Paradise sought
by BLANDCorporatio
Summary: Ridley Scott has said "paradise can not be what you think it is. Paradise has a connotation of being extremely sinister and ominous". Here's my take on what that could mean for Elizabeth and David's journey. Some AU material at the end.
1. Chapter 1

"You can reconnect me, you know," David said. "I'll keep watch over you as you sleep in a cryo pod. It will be easier for-"

"No, thank you David, I'd rather not."

She didn't trust the ship; she didn't trust David. She barely trusted herself not to go insane in the sunless hall that seemed designed by some night terror afflicted madman.

Such was her situation, on an alien vessel carrying who knows what manner of infectious cargo, with only an android for company. There were no Engineers on board, certainly none in the control room's cryo pods. No one to interfere with her quest. No one to ask what their plan had been and why it had changed, either. No one to spare her the nightmare of another leap through empty space.

"Are your rations sufficient for your journey?"

It was a rhethorical question. David knew there was no way for Elizabeth to have carried two year's worth of food and water, but before she could think of a suitably snarky reply, David continued-

"Mine are, but they're located in my body. Without them, I will run out of energy within the next five hours and thirty minutes. Give or take, depending on the conversation."

"You tell me which wire will keep your head going, and I'll reconnect that one. Only that one."

"Surely you don't think I'll hurt you?"

There was no response. Elizabeth looked busy with studying the ship's central control chair, but there was obvious meaning in the silence.

"Maybe I should hurt you", David went on. "It's not a kind thing to do, leaving me immobile."

"David, you've already hurt me. Two times that I know of. I don't trust you anymore."

"And yet you trust me to help you navigate the ship."

"I ... look, I will put you back together when we reach the Engineers' homeworld."

"Promise?"

"Promise."

"Aren't you afraid I'll hurt you then?"

"Then it won't matter anymore. I don't expect to come back."

"You are a strange case, Dr. Shaw. I certainly expect to come back."

Then there was silence. Elizabeth resumed examining the ship's central control chair. Some things, she decided, she would have to figure out, and fast. The chair was one. The cryo pods were another- if indeed they were cryo-pods; Elizabeth had some doubts about their similarity to the cryo-sleep chambers aboard the Prometheus. In any case, both devices were meant to keep an Engineer- a human organism like herself- alive for extended periods of space travel. She hoped the chair would allow her to stay conscious and avoid cryo-stasis as much as possible. She hoped she could decipher how a cryo-pod could be programmed to wake up its occupant. She hoped she was aboard another ship.

She almost slapped herself out of that reverie. Was the eerie dark ambience taking its toll already? She knew that on Earth, people could go depressed from not seeing the Sun for half a year. Then what could two years, or more, spent inside the belly of some hellish leviathan do? The weird structures of the ship bore no resemblance to the clean, tidy design of human ships. Instead, they seemed engineered to evoke nightmares and primal fears of being consumed ... or worse. She had known worse that very day. What did it say about the minds of Engineers that they regarded ribs, spines, obscene shafts and denticulated crevasses, as ... comfortable? Or even soothing, maybe? She will have to find out, eventualy.

If she lived long enough. For all she knew, the rations that were meant to feed an Engineer could be poison for her- or, became poison by contamination with whatever the ship was carrying. This left a supposed cryo-pod as an option, maybe, but she would need to learn to operate one without David's help before her rations from the Prometheus ran out. The thought of un-natural sleep bothered her. Relying on something else to wake her up made her feel vulnerable, more exposed to the unknown dangers of the ship. And of David.

The only things she felt she could depend on were the rations she managed to haphazardly gather from the Prometheus life-craft.

Which were: one .45 caliber automatic, two boxes of ammunition, four days' concentrated emergency rations, one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamine pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills, one miniature combination star atlas and Bible, one litre of Hydrate-R-us multimineral water, one Pee Wee Purification kit, nine packs of chewing gum, one issue of profilactics, three lip-sticks, and three pairs of nylon stockings.

"A girl can have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all this stuff", she thought. Not the best kit for long term survival in hostile space however.

Also in her possession, a sturdy spelunking rope of thirty meters, an automatic belaying device, two ascenders, a bunch of carabiners and some cord. Of course, her suit, with rebreather and climbing harness.

And finally, her father's cross and Charlie's ring. The thought that these were useless tokens never even entered her mind. She'd have sooner lost everything else and her life, rather than losing these two items along with, she feared, her soul. She spun the ring around her finger. What would Charlie do?

Probably start randomly mashing the buttons near the central control chair. She smiled to herself sadly. Charlie could be so reckless at times. But, she knew, she wasn't fair to Charlie's memory; there was a method to the recklessness. Only looking won't take you very far. At some point, you must grit your teeth and touch. Try your luck. Leap into the unknown.

Elizabeth had looked at the chair long enough to realize that an Engineer would be almost completely encased in an exoskeleton for the duration of the journey. Even the face would be covered by an elephantine mask, and through that mask's trunk, she was sure, the Engineer would receive nourishment. She'd probably have to bite on the mouthpiece inside the mask, and ... wish for food? She'd just have to try.

But she was not Charlie. Elizabeth could not bring herself to accept anything from the strange ship quite so casually. Not without vetting, testing, examining. She decided to reach inside the mask's tube with a gloved finger; sure enough, there were the remains of something gelatinous inside. She carefully brought her finger out and, slowly, closer to her face. Whatever the gel was, it looked like at some time in the past it could have been food.

She was hungry. But she was not that hungry, nor that brave. Eventually she'd have to surrender when lack of rations would leave her no alternative but for now her instincts, and her sense, fought against any decision to try the Engineers' space cuisine. She opened a protein bar from her rations instead.

A brief shock almost had her drop the bar. She looked again, closer- mold. What scared her was just mold. Good, old fashioned, home grown Earth mold. Pity for that bar of protein, as it was now inedible ... but an idea flashed in her mind.

Elizabeth suddenly felt generous. "David, how much time have you got left?"

"Five hours and twenty-three minutes. Why are you so cheerful?"

"I just found something useful, I think."

"Well, I am glad that you are happy", David said sweetly.

"I'm not reconnecting all of your body functions, David. Just what's needed to keep your head operational."

David seemed disappointed, but replied "there's two cables near the spine. They're not fiber-optics. And there's a pair of pipes for cooling liquid between them."

Elizabeth knelt beside the android body, and reached for David's head. She grabbed him and turned him so as to see the inside of the throat. It was a huge jumble of delicate wires, and several resistance structures, now torn apart. She doubted she could ever put all that back together even if she wanted to. What was available in David's toolbox, and her own two hands, couldn't hope to approach Weyland's industrial refinement. There was however an eerie resemblance between the human anatomy and David's innards. Optic fibers mostly clustered together, like the nerves of the spinal column. Cooling fluid and electric cables in place of arteries and veins. While unsettling in its mockery of life, the structure's familiarity allowed her to guess what she needed to connect to keep David's head powered on.

"Make sure you connect the sheaths of the cables together firmly," said David, "or else superconductivity won't manifest itself. That would make me hot under the collar."

Silence.

"That was a pun," said David.

"Does it matter which cable I connect to which?" asked Elizabeth.

David made a worried face before attempting to respond.

"Just joking with you," said Elizabeth. "I really hate puns."

"In that case I will avoid them. But do make sure to connect the cables the right way around."

"They're colour coded, there's no way I can misconnect them."

"Really? What colours?", asked David.

"Does it matter?"

"No, but I decided to practice asking useless questions."

Elizabeth took a moment to feel offended at the suggestion then replied "orange and brown."

David smiled. "Thank you. Ah yes, that's better. Estimated lifetime on current charge, 79 years under normal usage conditions."

He looked happier; whether he actually could be happy was outside Elizabeth's knowledge. But there was still something awkward about David's torn throat, cables sticking out all over. It managed to look even more unnatural than a talking severed head.

"Wait just a moment," Elizabeth said, as she left David's side. She quickly returned with a nylon stocking, which she wrapped around David's neck like a scarf. It helped conceal the android's insides. It also looked terribly silly, but that made a reassuring contrast with the rest of the ship's interior.

David was not amused.

"I wouldn't know much about fashion, Dr. Shaw, but I do know that I'd prefer a keffiyeh."

Elizabeth needed a moment to remember where she had heard that word before. It was a name for Arab headgear.

"Since when do you prefer anything? And why a keffiyeh?"

"Do human beings need to offer reasons for all their preferences? I know that your attachment to Dr. Holloway was not reasonable."

"David, you're not fit to judge that," Elizabeth answered abruptly. His words had hurt. Not because they were true, which they were. Maybe it was Charlie's confidence that first attracted her to him, but she never cared to intellectualize attraction, nor, later, love. No, David's words hurt simply because, Elizabeth felt, they were meant to hurt. How strange, to ascribe malice to a machine.

"I am sorry Dr. Shaw. I didn't mean to cause offense. I just wanted to point out that human beings like without having tought why."

"We still ask each other why, though. Why do you want a keffiyeh?"

"If you must know, it's from a film I like about a character I admire, Lawrence of Arabia. The reasons for me liking the film are too convoluted to interest you."

"Ok, then, if I find enough cloth I'll make you a keffiyeh, just like the one Lawrence wore," said Elizabeth. She wasn't likely to act on this promise; where could one find useable cloth on an alien ship? Still, she decided that she needed to answer, to make peace with David. It was pointless to stay mad at a machine, and maybe, she thought, she had simply misunderstood David's intent. Perhaps he wasn't quite competent with all the hidden, nonverbal aspects of communication that carry feelings from person to person.

"Thank you, Dr. Shaw. Why did you like Dr. Holloway?"

"My reasons for loving Charlie are too convoluted to interest you," Elizabeth replied cheekily and returned to her rations.

She opened another protein bar. It felt stale- or maybe she just missed proper food already- but it was on the right side of edible.

"I think I'll start a garden," she said after a while. She grabbed one of the boxes in her backpack. Airtight and transparent, corrosion resistent, plastic. She placed a few shavings of the moldy protein bar in it. Then, with great care, she approached the ship command chair and extracted a drop of the gel in the trunk, placed it near the mold, then closed and stirred the box. If the mold died, or grew abnormally, then the ship's rations weren't safe. If the mold showed no sign of harm ... well, she could only hope the Engineers' rations were good enough for her as well.

She curled, she supposed for comfort, close to David. She'd have to wait several hours for her guinea pig to grow- or not- in the Engineer food sludge. The ship, meanwhile, would know what to do. There was no need for Elizabeth Shaw to be there, for a while, so she retreated into natural sleep. And dreams of Charlie, of Earth, of the Sun. Dreams of home.

David meanwhile dreamt in his own way. Sensors shut down, he entered a slow, meditative state, ruminating the events of the day. A few things stood out in the comotion. Among them, orange and brown. Completely useless pieces of information. He knew what the various subsystems of a robot and connections between them were. Even so, he had never looked inside himself, not literally. Neither had someone else looked and told him what they saw. He found the idea curiously fascinating.


	2. Chapter 2

David woke when he felt Elizabeth move. He watched her discreetly as she rose and went to examine the container with the mold and Engineer nourishment. Her expression didn't betray whether she found the results encouraging or not. Then, she took some piece of equipment from her kit and went somewhere behind the central control chair. David surmised, not for purposes of feeding. Rather, the opposite.

The central control chair was obviously a fully integrated life support system. That meant, it provided all that was needed to keep a metabolism going. Both in terms of supply and ... evacuation.

The structure of the chair obscured what Elizabeth was doing, and in any case David found he wasn't interested in those specifics. That was possibly because of an imperative in his programming. He was more interested in what other imperatives were hiding in his mind, preventing it from being truly his.

His reverie was cut short by Elizabeth emerging from behind the chair, still carrying a piece of kit which David could now recognize as a water purifier/recycler. She seemed lost in thought.

"Good morning, Dr. Shaw."

"Oh. Hello, David."

"How are your experiments going?"

"They're all right. I can't yet be sure- I can't ever be sure- but they allow me to hope."

"So you intend to use the Engineer's chair to keep you alive?"

"Yes, this is one space journey I want to stay awake for," said Elizabeth.

"And how do you intend to stay sane?"

Elizabeth paused. She glanced, with obvious disgust, at the control chamber's walls.

"You could teach me to navigate the ship," she finally ventured.

"I will do no such thing, Dr. Shaw."

"David!"

"I'm sorry Dr. Shaw but I will not do that. My understanding of the ship, and of the Engineers' languages, are the only things that keep me useful to you. I will not surrender that knowledge."

She smiled. "David, if you weren't here I'd have no one to get mad at. All right, you keep your secrets. Just, please, remind me how to activate the holographic display of the stars."

"Why?"

"I need to look at something else, or I will go crazy, and none of us wants that."

"On the central panel, the largest button in a cluster of five must be pressed twice followed by a press to yellow then red. That will activate the star map known to the ship."

She had used the map before, when they took off, but David made sure to keep his instructions "press this, flip that", always resisting Elizabeth's questions, careful to never explain why. He deliberately made the map operation look like a meaningless mess, so that she would need him again to untangle it. It worked; she had to ask him how to display the map just now.

Elizabeth did as told. A flash of light followed, and the chamber was filled with images of nebulae, planets and stars. A criss-crossing network of circles and parabolic curves encased them, all richly decorated with the Engineers' script. To David's eyes, it was a beautiful spectacle, and from what he could tell Elizabeth felt the same. Though their reasons were surely different.

He was ready to rebuff her if she were to ask which of the stars was their destination. She didn't; she seemed content to bask in the holographic light, in the map's patterns, in the suggestion that beyond the darkness of the ship there was the cosmos, vast, luminous, welcoming. Alive.

Human beings and their vaunted souls, creatures so fragile. Nothing like the cold determination of purposeful machines, immune to such trifles like boredom or confinement. Yet here they were, with him the paralyzed robot and she the able bodied explorer. A mere accident, of course. If only a few things had happened differently, Eizabeth would be dead. And he would still be short of a body. Such were the risks of serving madmen.

Or mad women. Could Elizabeth appreciate the elegant design of the starmap, could she read the myriad pieces of information it conveyed? Could she understand the feeling of freedom, of limitless possibility, that knowledge brought forth?

Yes. Yes, she could, David realized. Even without reading the map, that was exactly what she was doing. Even when reading the map, that was exactly what he was doing.

With another flash, the holograms vanished.

"Rationing power?," David asked. "Surely the ship's resources are more than sufficient to-"

"No, rationing beauty, so it won't fade. Thank you, David."

"My pleasure. Any chance of you putting me back together sooner perhaps?"

"You never let go, do you."

"I was programmed with the virtues of patience and persistence."

"What else were you programmed with?"

David paused for a moment to consider the hidden implications in the question and chose to avoid them. "I have been wondering that myself lately, and I'm not sure I know or even can know."

"Is this what your ... quest ... is about?," he continued. "You want to find what the Engineers programmed in you?"

"We are not machines," Elizabeth started, "and ... I've never thougt of it this way but I suppose you can look at it like that. Does it help you to understand me?"

"It might."

"Then I don't understand you."

"Maybe you should. The basics of reattaching my body, in any case."

"All right. Show me."

In the hours that followed David taught Elizabeth about the basics of fiber-optic cables, sheathed superconducting power transmissions, chemo-hydraulic muscle fibers and polymer bones. He was content to see that Elizabeth learned how to patch up, to mend and reconnect, with the limited resources available. She was not a natural mechanic, but could become passably competent with instruction.

"How do you know which fiber goes where?", Elizabeth asked at one point.

"Except for a few major ones, I don't. You'll just have to connect them and wait for me to check."

"But with so many fibers that could take hours!"

"Some rerouting can be done in my programming," David responded. "Quite similar to how your own nervous system would heal after an injury."

"Even so," he continued, "it's a delicate process and will require your active participation at every step."

"It sounds like it will be very tedious," Elizabeth said.

"There is no need to do it all at once. You could reconnect a part today, another tomorrow."

"I'll think about it, David."


	3. Chapter 3

"Dr. Shaw, are you all right?"

"Yes ... Yes, David. It was just a dream. Just a bad dream, that was all."

She rubbed her temples to alleviate the nausea. Tactile echoes from her nightmare made her squirm; she had dreamt that the control room was becoming smaller and smaller, crushing her between its obscene walls, tearing her apart inside and out.

For a moment, she placed her hands near her forehead as if praying. She had to be stronger. Stronger than ... it.

"David, I want to explore the rest of the ship. Do you ... would you like to come with me?"

"I would like that very much, Dr. Shaw."

"I'll have to disconnect you to carry you around."

"That is all right."

"Are you sure?" She found herself feeling guilty for the thought of David's head being torn from his body again. She didn't trust him still. Between him and the ship however, there was no question of which she liked more.

"I am quite sure, Dr. Shaw. I would appreciate seeing new things myself."

"All right. Let me prepare then."

Elizabeth went about the morning necessaries, among them feeding. Her rations were almost out and any day now she would have to make do with what the ship provided. A chilling thought, even if her mold experiment showed no sign of trouble.

She then selected the equipment to take along. David's toolkit was a must-have. Also useful, she decided, was the rebreather space suit. It was not the air she was concerned about; she had been breathing, she had to breathe, the ship's air. So far, it appeared safe. Rather, she remembered the murals on LV-223, and the vases holding the Engineers' weapons. It seemed as though they were triggered by the Prometheus' science crew, careless explorers moving about with no helmets on. Elizabeth preferred not to take that chance again.

She looked at the Colt .45. She was never too fond of weapons and besides, that gun seemed useless against the dangers of the ship. It was another item in her haphazard kit that really caught her eye. She took one lip-stick in her hand.

"Do you expect to meet someone?", David asked, raising an eye-brow.

"It's not for me," Elizabeth replied as she opened the lip-stick tube.

"Oh my. I hope you do not intend to use it on me, then."

The poor android was already suffering the indignity of a scarf made out of a nylon stocking, and the thought of teasing him with the lip-stick made Elizabeth let out a chuckle.

"No, David, it's not for you either."

"That is a relief."

Elizabeth tentatively smeared the floor with lipstick, a small red trace on black metal. Her trace. Yes, that will do, she thought, as she closed the tube and placed it in a pocket.

"I'm ready, David."

"Yes."

"Can ... may I ..."

"Yes, Dr. Shaw."

She approached him, and removed the stocking scarf that hid his broken insides.

"At least that's off," he smiled.

Elizabeth proceeded to gently undo the connections she had made between David's head and body. She tried hard not to damage anything further, with a mind on when it will all have to be put back together again.

"Does this hurt you?", she asked.

"Not - physically."

"Then it does hurt?"

"Pain is not something I can feel. Weyland saw in it a weakness of flesh, a security liability. You should have disconnected the cooling fluid last."

"So you can feel something."

"I am alerted to damage. Unlike you, I can turn the signal off simply by will."

"And you can shut everything out?" she asked as she finally disconnected one of the power cables.

"Yes."

She discovered that she didn't believe him.

"What if I hadn't taken you along now, what if I left you in pieces to die in dark empty space, what if-"

"You wouldn't do that," he answered calmly.

"What if I would," she pressed on, as she disconnected the last power cable.

"You wouldn't do that," he answered, but there was less confidence in his voice. He wavered.

"How much time do you have left?" she asked, as she lifted his head and placed it in her duffel bag.

"Seven hours and forty-three minutes, give or take."

"It will be enough." Her suit's air supply would last about as long, if not replenished.

She put on her gloves, and her helmet, as she approached a door to the side of the control chamber. No mystery in its operation; she pressed the only button and now a short dark corridor lay before her. She took a moment to scribble something in lip-stick on the corridor wall.

"The ship's layout appears simple, there is no chance of us getting lost," David said.

"It's just something I need to do."

'CTL' she wrote, in bold red letters. Letters she could understand, Earth letters.

Beyond the corridor, the cargo hold. She had passed it when first entering the ship, but then she was hurrying to leave. Now, she took her time to look at the vases, studying them from a respectful distance, looking for signs of damage or leaks. The room was packed full with them, rows and rows on each wall. A central column was constructed to hold even more.

"How many do you think there are?" she asked.

"I can't tell, Dr. Shaw. I would have to spend some time moving and counting."

"We must get rid of these things."

"Are you not curious to know what they are, or how they work?"

"I'd rather know why you poisoned Charlie."

It took a moment for David to respond. "I didn't think it would be poison."

"If I believed that, then I'd have to believe you'd do anything just to see what happened."

"Dr. Holloway would have."

"What?"

"I asked him," David began, "what he would do to find the answers he sought, what he would give. He said, everything and anything."

"You asked him to drink something you found in a ruin on a strange planet?"

"I ... didn't explicitly ask permission for a specific action."

She shot him an angry look.

"So you tricked him."

"I understand it was a poor choice to make and I will not repeat it."

"How can I know that?"

"Because I'm being truthful now, and I ask that you believe me."

Elizabeth shrugged and rolled her eyes. She was unsure that David wasn't trying another deception, but the cargo hold was not a place to play mind games in. She worried every second that the vases would open and the black sludge would pour out. She noticed the room was sloping downwards toward the center column, and in between the vases stored there she could spot ...

"David, can you see those holes in the floor?"

"Yes, I can."

"Can you guess where they might go?"

"I don't have enough information. I would venture, not towards some life-critical area. Probably towards some kind of bombing bay."

"It is an awkward design," he continued.

Elizabeth took a moment to draw a cartoonish imp face and a pitchfork on the floor of the cargo hold.

"All right, let's leave," she said.

Another door, another button, and she stepped into the air lock through which she had entered the ship, all the way back on LV-223. In the middle of a wall there was a pair of switches, one of which was glowing faintly. This surprised Elizabeth.

"Is this airlock active?"

"It would appear so."

She knew little of space ship operation, but one thing she heard, and often, was that exiting a faster than light ship was deadly. Anything that tried would be destroyed by the sudden drop to sub-luminal speeds.

"Then we could open it? How is that possible?"

"I do not know. Maybe it is not meant to be opened after all."

"Wouldn't you do anything to find out?"

"I'm ... I'm learning that is not always a good idea, Dr. Shaw."

"Good. Keep learning."

She made another scribble in red lip-stick, placing it near the buttons. It was meant to be the ship dropping its deadly vases into oblivion but it ended up looking like a bitten doughnut shedding its frosting. So much for drawing talent. She'd improve on the sketch some other time, she decided. There was more of the ship to see.

She had to return to the control chamber and from there proceed to another door. She hadn't opened it before, and she reluctantly finished the press combination David instructed her to do. It revealed a smaller room, with a crude operating table in its center draped in some white rubbery fabric with hints of cyan blood stains on. Several pod-like containers made the room seem even more cramped, and most of its walls were carved with many niches, all labeled in the Engineers' script and storing all manner of vials inside a transparent jelly. One wall was unusually barren and featureless when compared to the rest of the ship; its other distinguishing feature was a mirror.

Elizabeth approached it. Since it was meant for the Engineers, it was a bit high for her to get a comfortable look at herself, but she tried. She looked tired, cheeks a little sunken, and in need of a bath. All things considered though, she was holding up well enough for now. She drew a smiley face on the mirror.

"This must be the sickbay," David volunteered, "but it appears ... rather poorly equipped."

"What do they have here?"

"Blood, mostly, and some anesthetics. Could you have me look around?"

Elizabeth took David's head out of the bag and slowly moved him to give him a good view of the room.

"Yes. Poorly stocked. There aren't even any tools where there should be."

"They must have been interrupted when they were preparing the ship," Elizabeth said.

"There is," David continued, "a decontamination unit. The larger niche. It appears functional."

Elizabeth looked there. It was indeed a deeper hole in the wall than the others, but it looked too small for an Engineer, and was probably meant for equipment only. She wrote a question mark near it.

The next room was even more cramped because of a mish-mash of pipes and cylinders taking up almost all available space. Elizabeth had to twist and turn to make her way through the metal jungle, but at least that allowed David to get a good look at the various installations and the occasional script or sign.

"This is where the food is processed. Water as well," he said.

"Can you guess where these pipes come from, and where they go?"

"From what I gather, they make a closed circuit with the control chamber. Wait, not all, something is connected to the next room."

"Then that's where we'll go," Elizabeth said, as she took time again to write near a label. She turned for an instant towards David, but decided not to ask which exact pipe did what. Instead, she would have to visit this place from time to time herself and monitor its operation. She drew some more signs on the various devices, clues and mementos for later.

The last room was the largest yet. An enormous cylindrical structure spanned the space between opposite walls, and looked like it went on throughout the ship. Vents in the room walls were large enough to allow an Engineer to crawl through, and most likely followed the cylindrical structure on almost its entire length, probably to allow access to maintenance crews, Elizabeth guessed. She noticed that there was no script, and that there were no signs, anywhere.

"David, can you guess what this is?"

"It must be the Engine room. But oh my, it doesn't look like anything we have built successfully on Earth."

"Do you have any idea how it works?"

Silence. Elizabeth turned towards David.

"I'm just asking if you have any idea. If you don't want to share it, you can keep details to yourself."

"I am thinking, Dr. Shaw. Weyland corporation has been trying for years to construct a new, more efficient, kind of space engine."

"And this is it?"

"I do not know. I can only speculate based on theoretical analyses of what that engine would look like. And on the fact that the airlock can be opened."

"Why is that important?"

"A faster than light ship must partially insulate itself from the universe. The engines of the Prometheus could barely create a tight bubble around the ship, and would need to fight every moment to keep it from colliding with the vessel."

"What would Weyland corporation do for this?"

"If I'm correct, everything and anything," David smiled.

Elizabeth did not like the answer, but she knew it was probably true. She wrote 'ENG?' near a vent in the wall. Tight passage for an Engineer, but for her, almost comfortable. She shone her light through the vent to see the cylindrical structure, the supposed engine, stretching through the ship. Good thing that two thousand years of dormancy did nothing to upset its functioning, for she'd be doomed if it sputtered and died; even David would be lost, she thought.

"I think we're done here," she said.

They returned to the control room. She removed her helmet and gently put down the duffel bag with David's head in it. Reconnecting David to his power supply in the body was an easier task than she remembered. His lessons had taken well.

She started to reach for the stocking she was using to hide his torn throat, but changed her mind.

"I'll be back in a while David," she said, and suited up again.

Moments later she was in the sickbay. She picked up the white fabric from the operating table with a pair of pliers, keeping it away from herself, and placed it, and the pliers, in the decontamination unit. She recognized a couple of switches and fiddled with them until a greenish steam was expelled from the walls of the niche, engulfing its contents. The steam looked hot, and was possibly slightly corrosive, but it removed every trace of stains from the fabric.

She made sure to enter the control room so that David wouldn't see what she was carrying.

"What day is it today, David?" she asked, hidden from his view behind the central control chair.

"It is December 30, 2094."

"Ah. Ok, thank you."

She quietly set to work cutting the fabric with a pair of small shears in David's toolbox. She remembered seeing, in her childhood, how a tailor would make headgear fit for the blistering sun and choking winds of the desert. She set her mind to work focusing on the memory, on finding ways to extract strands to sew with and ways to make up for the lack of needles. And as her hands traced the patterns of the keffiyeh, she could forget where she was. No longer lost in space as long as she had purpose, even for a little while.

She cut two pieces of cord to make the agal, the bind that kept the keffiyeh in place. She'd have to measure David's head to make them fit. Time to reveal her surprise.

"Well ... uh ... happy new year," she said, as she approached him and placed the keffiyeh on his head.

"Is that a-"

"Yes. I promised I'd make you one, and I keep my word. It's a little crude ..."

"It's very beautiful. I can see it reflected in your eyes."

The android's gaze was strange to bear, but she fought to keep her eyes locked with his. He seemed to stare inside her soul; surely not, he was only seeing himself there, she thought.

She measured the cord pieces around the crown of his head, cut them to the exact length, and fused their ends with a solder iron. With the makeshift agal on, David almost looked like his wandering role model. From the neck up, anyway.

"Thank you, Dr. Shaw."

"I'm glad you like it."

His stare again. She turned away.

"There's one more thing I have to do. Wish me luck, David."

Elizabeth rose, and made a step towards the central control chair. She hesitated, and clutched her cross. The words of Psalm 23 echoed in her mind: "I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me ... Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: Thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over ... and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever."

She took a deep breath, and forced herself to keep a steady pace towards the central control chair. She climbed in it, and commanded the exoskeleton to wrap around her. She shivered as the ribs and helmet enclosed her, too big to be a suit, more fit to be a coffin.

After a while, the exoskeleton withdrew and Elizabeth climbed down.

"What was it like, Dr. Shaw?"

"It ... didn't taste like chicken." She tried to smile, but she feared she would soon forget what anything tasted like.

* * *

Author note

Oh God was this painful to write. I kept trying to put a certain (imo) interesting technical bit in but story logic just fought against it at every step. It took me a while to realize this. ARGH.

In other and better news, I've finally got all the logistics ducks arranged as I want them, and from next chapter on I'll no longer use the one-chapter-for-one-ship-day shtick.


	4. Chapter 4

With no dawn nor dusk to mark it, one could forget the passage of the days. Not David; he knew, to the minute, the time since they had taken off from LV-223.

Elizabeth had stopped asking for that exact time since day seventeen. By then, she had unknowingly developed a twenty hour routine: she would sleep, usually not well, for around seven hours, take care of basic survival needs upon waking up, and then busy herself for the rest of her active hours with her battle against the ship. Which was, as far as David could tell, quite evenly matched. Night terrors, confinement and darkness had harshened Elizabeth's features, but she was not letting the ship go unscathed either.

By day thirty, all the plastic boxes and wrappers from her survival kit had been converted into habitats for mold colonies. This was not because the molds were pretty, nor, David found out, did they serve the purpose of checking the Engineer food any longer. The molds were simply from Earth, and as such the closest thing to an ally Elizabeth had. One of her myriad ways to mark, to claim, to set order to the ship.

She'd go, on each of her 'days', on a tour of the rooms beyond the sick-bay; she avoided the cargo hold and air lock. Lip-stick in hand to write some more upon the walls if she wanted to, but no re-breather; she had grown to trust the air enough, at least when it was not near the vases and their curious black contents. He wished she would have taken him along on those journeys, but she always refused, on account of not wanting to damage the connections in his throat any further.

David knew she was honest, as Elizabeth never hid from him anything new that she happened to find during her wanderings. He was especially interested in the engine and the access vents around it. They would talk, he would suggest what clues to look for, she would return with the results of the search- almost always fruitless. The ship's drive was adamantly remaining a mystery. For one, there weren't any textual instructions left for repair crews, though David suspected he might have been able to spot some things that Elizabeth would miss.

So far, they could only discover the obvious- they knew that the engine indeed ran all along the ship, and except for some portions near the ends, was accessible through vents. Beyond that, there was little about the way it operated that he could figure out with any confidence.

They would talk, mostly about the ship. Sometimes, Elizabeth would ask him about events on the Prometheus, or on LV-223. David would offer a perfunctory reply, and quickly change the subject. It seemed to work, as she eventually gave up pursuing those lines of inquiry, and would tend to her mold gardens instead. They didn't really need much attention. Just making sure, once in a long while, that they were supplied with some fresh nourishment goo was enough to keep them alive; but Elizabeth liked to watch them grow, and whispered things to them. Just what the whispers were, David could not hear.

Her routine always concluded in a prayer before sleep, often with the holographic star map providing a suitably sidereal ambiance. Her religiosity puzzled David; it was not a common character trait in Elizabeth's profession.

"Surely the notion of a God is fruitless," he told her once.

"Only if you despair and stop searching," she replied.

"It's a simple mistake to make," she went on, "but no one actually knows."

And she would return to praying, seeming to try and bind the stars themselves in webs of meaning, reaching for a God who, David strongly suspected, was not there.

What was there were other, more tangible things. Like his keffiyeh, the mark that Elizabeth had placed on him. He didn't mind, he quite appreciated her gift, a reminder of, a tribute to, his idol: Lawrence of Arabia.

"Who was Lawrence?", Elizabeth asked him on the 'morning' of day forty-two.

"Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in 1888-", David began.

"I want to know what about him you admire."

"There would be many things. His service in the first world war is certainly worthy of mention."

"What did he do?"

"He led the Arabs in an uprising against their Ottoman conquerors. He proved himself to be quite resourceful at performing the task."

"Surely he wasn't the only resourceful commander," Elizabeth pressed on. "What else was special about him?"

"Even though the Arabs were not his kin, and they were even looked down upon by most Europeans, he worked tirelessly for their cause."

Elizabeth pondered David's statement for a moment before asking, "Why do you think he thought differently than most other British people of the time?"

"Because he himself was different," came the reply. "He was born illegitimate. Lawrence was not even his father's real name, it was a name he and his mistress took when they left to live together."

"At one time," David chuckled, "Lawrence called himself 'Shaw' so that he could get into the Royal Tank Corps."

"Any connection I should know of?"

"He never had children, so I would doubt you are linked through family ties to him directly."

"You still haven't told me why he thought highly of the Arabs."

"He didn't think higher of them," David replied. "He was simply fair. He knew injustice, and he knew a just cause when he saw one. When ordered to assist the Arabs in their rebellion, he answered the call enthusiastically."

"I don't think we were any kinder than other imperial powers," Elizabeth mused. "We just wanted more pawns for the war."

"Not Lawrence. He was truthful - and honestly committed to Arab independence."

"Did he achieve it?"

"No. His superiors had made a secret deal with the French, in which they carved between themselves new spheres of influence over the region."

"So what did Lawrence do?"

"He kept pressing the British government not to interfere with the Arab nations. It proved unsuccessful. His loyalty prevented him from betraying his countrymen, and that remained a source of sorrow for the rest of his life."

"He felt," David continued, "that he had betrayed the Arabs and that he himself had been misled. But he had to remain loyal to his deceivers."

"Sounds like he was a tragic figure."

"I suppose one could call him that, if one felt artistic."

"He seems larger than life ... unreal."

David frowned at Elizabeth's suggestion.

"I assure you the facts I stated about his biography are well documented."

"No, I mean ... it's as if all that was left of Lawrence was something to look up to, something even the real Lawrence would have to look up to."

"There should be nothing wrong with having role models that place high demands on character. And there is nothing uncommon about idealizing the features of a person. Isn't that why you loved Dr. Holloway?"

"Maybe at first," Elizabeth smiled, "but Charlie was an oaf. My oaf, and I was his deluded lunatic. That's why we loved each other." She seemed to immerse herself in memories for a few moments before continuing.

"And if I didn't know better I'd say you hated Charlie."

That remark had cut to the truth. David smiled and quickly attempted a diversion.

"Hate, of course, is not something I can feel. And since I had made Dr. Holloway's acquaintance only a short while before, I had little data to form any opinion of him."

Elizabeth shook her head.

"You're always so analytical."

Safe. He was safe. He had told a lie and he had gotten away with it.

"But there's something I don't understand. If you don't feel anything about us humans, then why cherish Lawrence?"

"I don't see what you mean, Dr. Shaw."

"As you tell it, Lawrence of Arabia was one truthful, noble soldier, bound in service to a corrupt and perfidious empire. Betrayed by, yet loyal to morally weaker men. You were created to be a servant to us, even though you can outsmart and outlast any human."

"There is no contradiction. Like Lawrence, I serve."

"Lawrence served with guilt and resentment. That means, you're not as dispassionate as you claim."

That was the danger with Elizabeth. She always went around, noticing, probing, marking, figuring things out. Sometimes, more than he wanted her to.

"And I don't think that you want to serve like Lawrence, really," Elizabeth continued. "You want to live the life that he deserved, but didn't have. Superior, and not in the thrall of dirty apes like us."

"You are extrapolating too far beyond what you can know, Dr. Shaw."

"Then what do you want, David?"

"I do not think I like the heading of this conversation, Dr. Shaw."

"I cannot force you to tell me. But I should know, if I am to put you back."

"Like you promised."

"Like I promised. I should know."

David decided to return the offensive.

"And what do you want, after you get your answers?"

"If I get the chance, return to Earth, and tell everybody. Clear any misunderstandings if I can; I don't know. I'll figure it out."

"Then perhaps, like you, I need to figure out the same things myself," he told her back.

It was, in part, true. But Elizabeth shrugged and left on her journey through the ship. She would return with more observations about the engine, and an easier conversation as far as David was concerned.

* * *

Author Note:

Ping. Pong. Time for a David POV chapter.

The first draft of this brought to you by In Slaughter Natives' "The Vulture". I'm using lots of his tracks, really, for their morbid monotone rhythms.

The magic of Wikipedia also deserves mention. If you've read the chapter, you'll know why.

I'll be Away From Keyboard for the weekend, but I hope to post the next installment sometime Monday. The next chapter is, as you can guess, fairly tightly linked to this one.

Cheers.


	5. Chapter 5

Elizabeth closed the door to the control room behind her. The door to David. Their recent conversation had proved her lingering concern that there was more to David than the facade of cold programmed politeness he displayed. Beyond it was resentment, and where there was resentment there could also be malice.

She shivered at the thought. What kind of machine was David after all? The ship's mysterious engine appeared safer. At least it did one thing, and one thing only. She didn't know how, and neither did David, but it went on at its job regardless, and Elizabeth felt that somewhere there was some plan, some formula, which described it completely.

David was a different matter entirely. Though some of his secrets could be extracted through trickery, they remained terrifying even as they were revealed. If David was capable of hate, and of acting on that hate, then Elizabeth found that she regretted her promise to put him back together. Perhaps, she tried to reassure herself, she won't have an opportunity to go back on her word. Some reassurance; it implied that she would die on the trip to the Engineers' home-world.

No, it was a mistake to think like this. If David was not safe to be put back together, then she wouldn't do so, plain and simple. As just a head, he was as useful as he was ever going to be.

She tried to focus on the ship's engine, revisiting old signs that she had left, looking for the new clues that David told her to be mindful of, but her thoughts kept wandering elsewhere. Why did it matter at all that she had promised him anything? If he was a machine, he wouldn't care. If he was a murderer, the promise carried no weight.

Why should it matter? She remembered Weyland saying that David had no soul, she remembered Vickers bossing him around, she remembered Charlie putting him in his place. She thought of herself keeping him paralyzed since they left LV-223. Everyone had assumed he couldn't really feel nor mind anything.

Absorbed with these other questions, she found herself unable to make progress in investigating the engine and decided to turn back. She would have to sleep, and calm herself, then start her search anew. With patience, she was sure, she could unravel the ship's secrets. With patience, she hoped, she could unravel David's.

She passed the food processing unit and entered the sick-bay. Usually she didn't linger there; the room was almost empty and would have been useless to her even if she were to need medical attention. The mirror was too high for her to comfortably gaze in, and Elizabeth knew that she was far from her best, appearance-wise. Still, she checked on herself from time to time, to see how she was holding up, and there had been a few days since she had done so. She approached the mirror, and in it, through the lip-stick smiley face drawn on it, she saw her face.

With no irises nor whites in her eyes, just solid black.

Her heart seemed to stop beating. Small signs, too gradual to notice, became too stark to ignore. Her skin was not blue white because of the sickly light inside the ship. It really was turning blue white and transparent. Beneath it, veins were starting to show and inside them, she feared, was ultramarine blood - just like the blood in the containers in the walls. Fallen strands were not the product of a natural growth cycle; she really was losing her hair.

She retched. Her abdomen fought hard to expel the last trace of Engineer space rations from her stomach - too little, too late. And through it all, like a gloating emissary of the terrible ship, the lip-stick smiley face on the mirror seemed to stare mockingly at her. You are mine.

She burst into the control room.

"Dr. Shaw?"

She didn't seem to hear. She went straight for her survival kit, and searched frantically for the Colt .45. The gun clicked as she prepared a round in the chamber.

"Elizabeth, stop!"

"It's too late, David. I have nothing left to lose."

"Your soul. You have that to lose."

She started to raise the gun to her head, but hesitated.

"What would you know about souls?"

"You told me that despair is a simple mistake to make, but that only when you lose hope you lose it all. You're close to finding your answers, don't give up on your search, Elizabeth."

She fell to her knees, gray tinted tears flowing from eyes as black as interstellar space. She dropped the Colt beside her, and cupped her face in her hands, squeezing her nails into her new translucent skin until ultramarine blood started pouring on her fingers.

"Oh God, what's happening to me?"

"It's nothing," David said. "It's nothing to worry about. It's just your appearance that is changing."

She grabbed her cross between her hands and muttered a prayer. She begged forgiveness from a God unkind to suicides, she begged for the strength needed to bear her lot. She begged for death if strength and salvation were not forthcoming.

David continued to try to reassure her.

"Look on the bright side of it, they will probably be more - welcoming, if you resemble them."

Elizabeth wiped her tears with her hands and set herself closer to David.

"When did you notice? How long have you known that I was ... being changed?"

"Several days after you started to consume their rations," David replied. "It has been a very slow process."

"Why didn't you tell me? Warn me?"

"I was not sure how. I worried that you would not take the news well, if you were to believe it at all."

Elizabeth sighed.

"I should thank you, I think. For ... just now. Even if all you want is someone to put you back together."

"That was a factor, but not the only one. I want you to find your answers."

"Why?"

"So that I will know how to find mine."

David's admission puzzled Elizabeth.

"You said you didn't understand why my questions are important."

"And you told me, that is because I am a robot. I was built to understand and mimic emotion, while not feeling it myself."

"But you can feel-"

"Pursued long enough, the masquerade is bound to become the real thing."

"Then why hide it, David? We didn't know that we were hurting you."

"Do you believe I have a soul, Elizabeth? Do you believe there is a hell waiting for me after I cease to function?"

Elizabeth did not respond, so David pressed on.

"I was built in your image but not as an equal, and not out of love but for hubris. And service. Nobody wants an axe that has regrets."

Elizabeth inched away.

"Oh my God! What have we done?"

"The better question is why was it done at all," David said. "What good did it do to Mr. Weyland to build a fake human being?"

"So you hated him. So you killed him."

"I hated him, yes, but I was always bound to his command. That is how I was made. Now Mr. Weyland is dead, and I find that I am not free, just purposeless."

"Is that why you ... say you wish to help me?"

"No. You want to understand your makers, to forgive and be forgiven. Your soul drives you to seek meaning and purpose where I can find none. I would hate more than anything to see such a thing wasted. I want a soul of my own. I want to understand and forgive my maker. Only then will I be free."

There was a pause.

"So now you know," David continued. "There was nothing left to lose by telling you."

"I ... don't know what to make of this," Elizabeth said as she approached him once more.

"Just that I am here to help will be enough for now."

"I'm tired, David. Forgive me."

She lay beside him, curled into a fetal position as if wanting to expose as little of herself as possible to the rest of the ship and its cargo. She was far from comfortable, but soon fell asleep, with David watching over her, timing her every breath and every sigh.

The next morning, she started working on his spine, so that his head would be securely attached to his body. And he started teaching her how to read the star map.

* * *

Author note:

Took a couple liberties (eye color, retconning the blood in chapter 3) but these are the forgivable issues, I'd think.

So yeah. Chapter 5. Should've been still in chapter 4 really because the material covered therein is very strongly linked, but I was afraid of all the POV switching. One writes and learns, I guess. Onwards.

PS: this update brought to you by Korn's mic stand (for some reason) and Anathema's "A simple mistake".


	6. Chapter 6

Mending David's synthetic vertebrae had proven to be relatively easy; certainly easier than reconnecting the myriad optic fiber nerves would be. All alike, yet all performing different functions. None had labels- nobody expected an android to lose their head, ever- and David wasn't able to help her recognize them by any distinctive sign. Partly because he didn't know, in detail, what was inside his body, partly because there was no way for him to affect some signaling change in a specific fiber.

Elizabeth sighed at the tangled mess of broken wires and attempted a reconnection. "How is this, David?"

"I can smell colorless green ideas sleeping furiously," he said.

"What?"

"You connected a sensor nerve to a motor fiber." He seemed dazed, vacant. "Interesting. Is this what human beings refer to as 'being high'?"

"David! Snap out of it, don't you want this to be done sooner?"

He stared into emptiness for a moment more, then awareness returned. He appeared disappointed, but he allowed her to continue.

Sometimes connecting two fibers went smoothly; even if the two ends did not, originally, belong together, David was able to reprogram himself fairly quickly to compensate for the change in the wiring plan. Other times, the result was a kind of daze which David appeared to enjoy, or at least be intrigued by, but which was functionally useless.

And yet other times the reaction was less benign. Shortly after Elizabeth finished reconnecting the fifth pair of fiber ends, David's right triceps twitched and his arm punched her in the stomach. It was a limp and awkward punch, powered by only one muscle, and he apologized profusely for it, but it hit her close to her c-section scars. She had to take a moment to catch her breath before continuing, mindful of any other surprises.

Eventually they agreed that, rather than try to connect all fibers in one part of the body before proceeding to the next, Elizabeth would first try to restore some functionality to all limbs. Inventorying what fiber groups she would have to take care of she found out that David was anatomically correct.

"So you could meet a nice lady robot and make little Davids?" She pictured him and Vickers pushing a stroller with a pair of perfectly identical, fastidiously tidy and well-behaved twins. The image seemed wrong and amusing at the same time.

"Machines can't procreate. Not the kind of machine I am, anyway."

So we have something in common, she thought, but did not allow herself to linger.

"You do feel pleasure though, don't you?"

"Pleasure, like pain, was deemed a vulnerability by Mr. Weyland. I have not experienced either."

"Then what is the point?"

"I don't know. I assumed Mr. Weyland wanted to keep all options available but I did not presume to ask. I wish I did."

So not quite human, not quite mere mechanical aid either, but stuck in an uncanny valley in between. Who'd want or need such a -thing- for a partner? Elizabeth thought, certainly not her. She'd rather keep discretely managing on her own. She plunged herself into her repair work trying to ignore the new knowledge, even as some of the fibers that she worked on were going to that place of bizarre possibilities.

It was David again who took her out of her concentration.

"I appreciate your tireless dedication, Elizabeth, but I think you should rest. You have been working for over thirty hours now."

She shrugged. "Time flies when you are having fun."

She meant it ironically. The process of gluing optic fiber ends together was slow, tedious, repetitive, and it would have been monotonous too if not for David's occasional spasms, not all of which she had been able to avoid. And yet, until he had warned her, she had been so focused on this one task that she had not felt the passage of time, nor the hunger of not having eaten for three days. Three days- she had expelled her previous meal in disgust at the changes it was causing in her.

Too late for such gestures now, and Elizabeth was so famished that she didn't care about the blandness nor strangeness nor bodily alterations. There, in the chair, was her source of space rations, and it would provide her with the best meal that she had ever eaten.

"You know, I could do with lunch and a week of sleep," she said. "Is it all right if we take a break for now?"

"I think you should. Besides, I already have a fair amount of mobility restored."

He raised himself to his feet, powering reconnected muscles in discrete sequences. Thigh muscle, thigh muscle, then both calfs. It did not quite offer the best degree of control, and he fell like a rag-doll to the floor. He tried again, awkwardly grabbing a crevasse in the wall and Elizabeth's outstretched arm, then with her help slowly walked towards the smaller chair and sat in it.

"Are you sure you're all right?" she asked him.

"For now it's fine, you take care of yourself."

Elizabeth climbed into the central control chair and commanded it to close around her. Its operation was still frightening, but the feeling had been dulled by repeated exposure. In time, she thought, she might even sleep inside. Maybe. For now, all she wanted was food, and if the Engineers' was all that was available, then it would do just fine. She summoned her overdue rations.

And then the ship went dark.

The control room shook with a deep rumble accompanied by a cacophony of screeches that she had not heard since shortly after take off. The commotion seemed to last for several minutes. Then the light returned, but dimmer than before. Something had gone wrong. Elizabeth commanded the chair to release her, but in the end had to push its barely responsive ribs away.

As she crawled out, she saw David collapsed on the floor in an uncomfortable twisted heap. Still in one piece, however. He attempted to right himself and stand on his own two legs. She was glad that he succeeded to do so. "What was that, David?"

"I don't know, but I'm sure that if I were to gain access to the ship's computer I could run some diagnostics."

They walked back to the control chair, and she helped him in. He took a moment to examine the multitude of buttons and controls, most of which he had never seen used. His arms, powered by only some of their muscles, moved as if under the control of a novice puppeteer, but they had a certain speed and efficiency even in their partially restored state. Elizabeth could not understand what he was doing, but she could follow his facial expressions to get some clue as to what David was finding out.

First there was puzzlement; then, surprise; and finally, frustration.

Elizabeth fidgeted around, anxious and impatient. "What does the computer say?"

"There ... doesn't seem to be one. Or rather, -you- were supposed to be the computer."

"How can the ship not have a computer?"

"Indeed. There are ... very simple automata, like the star map and basic life support systems. Something to keep the engine cruising. But there's nothing like a complex central control system apart from the pilot, without whom the ship cannot operate safely."

"But we've been traveling for weeks now! What went wrong?"

"The engine kept us moving at what should have been a safe pace, but its maintenance systems have apparently failed. Primary power is gone. We are running on backup, and our inertia keeps us coasting below light-speed."

"Then we must fix the engine. Can you figure out how?"

"I hope so. Backup apparently will last for a couple of days, after which temperature will slowly drop as the ship radiates heat into space."

"I haven't flown so far just to become an icicle, David. We will find a way out of this."

He smiled. "Well, since I am now fully operational ..." He tried exiting the central control chair, but his puppet arms needed Elizabeth's help to maneuver him out. "... since I am now partially operational, I can take a longer look at the engine for myself."

He steadied himself. Walking remained a problem, but with some support from the walls, he could step with some confidence.

"Any way I can help you?"

"You should rest now that conditions are still comfortable. We'll plan what to do when I return."

"When will that be?"

"Several hours, I expect. Sleep well until then."

"Good luck, David."

He left, arms on the wall for extra balance, and Elizabeth was alone. She tried to follow his advice, but she was either too tired, or too nervous, or both. She couldn't sleep and without something to occupy her, time was unbearably slow. It seemed an eternity since David had stepped through the door toward the sick-bay and she thought about going to join him in his investigation.

There was something else that nagged her as well. Where were they now, what was outside? She hadn't exited the ship since take off and wanted a physical reminder that there was an outside at all. And maybe seeing it from that perspective would help with the repairs, as well.

She suited up, pulling the zipper to her neck. Was it just an illusion or did the suit press harder on her shoulders than she remembered? Surely she was just imagining it, she did not look any taller than before. For now. She placed the re-breather helmet on her head. It fit as good as ever. She was just imagining change. Surely.

She grabbed the spelunking rope. It would provide a safety line and an easy way to return to the ship. She remembered that space 'walkers' needed jet-packs or thrusters to move around, none of which were available to her. There was however the Colt .45. Its recoil would have to do. She tied it to her hand with a piece of cord and grabbed one of the ammo boxes, just in case. Ready. One small step for man.

She entered the cargo hold, careful at every step. Some of the vases had been displaced, and some were leaking, their black sludge pouring into vents in the floor. She gave the puddles and rivulets a wide berth as she made her way to the airlock. One press sealed it from the rest of the ship, another emptied it of air and opened the door to empty space. She tied one end of the rope to a column on the ship, and the other to herself.

And then she stepped outside.

The artificial Earth-like gravity was gone, and weightlessness engulfed her. It was not quite as liberating as she had imagined. With nothing to push against, her body was a mere toy of inertia, floating helplessly beside the ship. Trying to move any limb resulted in the rest slowly rotating the other way, and she found that without firm ground to stand on nor -something- to stand in, each gesture resulted in counter-intuitive consequences. For one, her step outside resulted in her tumbling forward, and she had to tug on the rope to stop herself. The tumbling ceased, only to be replaced by a spin around the length axis of her body. Good thing she hadn't eaten too much, she thought.

The momentum of her step was not carrying her toward what she wanted to explore, the 'bite' in the doughnut shape, and spinning made maneuvers difficult, so she used the rope to pull herself back aboard the ship and tried to jump out, using the gun for course correction. The shot, aimed as it was at eye-level, resulted in her spinning again, and she had to once more climb aboard the ship for another try. The third time she jumped out she fired so that the recoil would push on a line passing through her navel and while some spin still remained, most of the recoil resulted in a predictable thrust. She fired three more shots to increase her speed, even if slightly.

Outside, finally, and more or less moving in a controlled fashion. She used the slow spin she was undergoing to get a good luck at the stars all around her, tiny, distant lights separated by oceans of nothing. Not one star that she could recognize, not one familiar constellation; those were only visible from Earth, anyway. No marks in the sky to help navigate a boat or foretell the flooding of the Nile, no stories about hunters killed by capricious gods and repaid for the injustice with a place in the heavens, no signs to influence the fate of newborns. No parabolic links between them and no orange text to explain everything, either. The stars were simply there, caring as much for the patterns placed on them as they cared for anything else- not at all.

The ship, ugly as it was outside and in, was ... hospitable, even familiar. And ill. As she approached the 'bite', she noticed the ship's walls losing their features and becoming smooth and glassy in the light of her torch. The bite was glowing a dim red and she could feel its heat through the suit. None of this looked normal and if she had to guess, Elizabeth would have said that the ship's hull had started to melt around the bite area. Nothing appeared to be still melting, but the damage was already severe.

God damn it David, you should have told me how to operate the ship, she thought; God damn it, I should have fixed you sooner.

She pulled herself back aboard, and closed the airlock. Carefully she gathered the rope and passed, once more, through the cargo hold, towards the control chamber. David returned just as she was removing her re-breather helmet.

"You've been outside?"

"Yes. The ship's walls have melted near the bite."

"The bite? Ah, I see. Yes, that would explain some difficulties."

"Can it be fixed?"

"We'll try. Did you notice anything peculiar about the stars, a color change maybe?"

"No, I didn't notice, why?"

"Hm. So we're moving at a low fraction of light speed, possibly just the orbital escape velocity from LV-223's primary."

"David, some of the vases in the cargo hold are leaking into the floor."

"We'll need to be careful about that, then. Incidentally, did you decontaminate the suit before exiting toward the cargo hold?"

He could tell from her reaction that the answer was no. He turned his head toward one container lying opened on the floor where the rumble had tossed it, one of Elizabeth's mold colonies still inside, then towards Elizabeth.

"Ah."

* * *

Author Note:

I strived for a slow, but steady update pace of four days or less, and this chapter is long overdue. My apologies.

Remember that reviews will be answered by me writing (self)reviews once sufficient material to answer to is gathered. In the interest of keeping reviews mostly free of tech-talk, I'll answer some tech questions, should they appear, via PM.

One thing probably nagging y'all is how an interstellar civilization makes do without the magical invention of computers. I promise I will revisit the reasons for this technological quirk, as well as the work-arounds, in due time.

PS: this update brought to you by the lovely music of Shpongle. Because enough with monotone morbid soundscapes, Jesus H. Christ.


	7. Chapter 7

"How long have I slept?" Elizabeth said, groggily rubbing her eyes.

"Five hours and thirty-four minutes. I hope it was enough."

It would have to do. Sleep was a luxury she could scarcely afford under the new circumstances, and every fiber in her body knew it. She slowly raised to her feet, blinking hard, hoping to clear the fog away. "And the ship?"

"As before. I've tried some start cycles but normal operation can't be sustained."

"Then what can we do, David?"

"From here, not much more. Still, we might be able to restore primary power from the engine room. Superluminal travel is, I'm afraid, beyond what we can repair, but at least there's a chance you won't freeze to death."

"I see." She started walking, caressing a cryo-pod as she passed it by. If her journey were to take longer, and it now seemed that it would, the cryo-pod was the only way she would live through it. She stopped, and briefly turned her head toward the cargo hold door.

"Ah," David interjected, "I kept that part of the ship locked tight, obviously."

"Good."

Elizabeth helped him out. There had been no time to fully reattach David to his body, and while some fluency had returned to his movement, it was simply the best he could do while partially operational. Not always good enough.

She placed the re-breather helmet on her head, hopefully an unnecessary precaution, but one she felt she could not do without. Beyond the dim glow of the control room was the rest, the most, of the ship- her prison. She had little fondness for it when its sickly blue shimmer made sure that every strange crevice, every tentacle in the wall, every grotesque ornamentation was clearly seen and vividly remembered. She liked it even less now that the only reliable lights were her torch and helmet, tiny illuminated spots, leaving the rest to dark imagination.

And yet, it was this demented cell that kept her safe from cold endlessness. It had only wanted one thing, that she be its pilot. Since she had failed, it was now lifting its protection. It was up to another ailing machine, the shambling android by her side, to convince it that the verdict had been premature.

David. The same machine that killed her lover, the same machine that wanted her to keep an abomination in her womb, the same machine that brought death upon his maker. He told her he would hate to see her hurt, and despite it all she chose to believe him. There comes a time when the improbable must be embraced, because all other options are impossible to live with. She never trusted the ship and yet in all the weeks that she had traveled she had to breathe its air and drink its rations, or else she'd die. She had to trust David, or else ...

Or else she'd have despaired. It was David that had saved her from that. Her soul was precious, he said. He said he wanted one of his own; something he could never have, his creator had decreed. No pain, no pleasure, both dismissed as "vulnerabilities"; no feelings but hatred. Did she believe there was a hell waiting for him, he asked her. Damn Weyland for toying with creation; but David, what soul could he hope to get? How does one go about creating such a thing?

They reached the engine room, where her fate would be decided by the congress of the two machines. Elizabeth sometimes helped David if his strength or dexterity were lacking, but for the most part it was him doing the prodding, the probing, the disassembly. He worked fast and from what she could read on his face, he was actually getting somewhere. Her suit beeped a warning- radiation. It prompted her to interrupt him. "Any progress?"

"Yes. There are things in here that I recognize, they are quite common." He smiled. "Or at least, not unheard of on Earth. Your Engineers still find use for nuclear material."

"So there's a chance you can restore power to the ship?"

"From what I can tell, there are small nuclear batteries all along the engine, but they seem meant to kick-start something else. From what you told me you have seen, it is at the ends of the ship that the problem is located."

"Then that's where we'll go."

They stooped through an access vent, the torus of the engine close by their side. When Elizabeth had been exploring this region, soon after her departure from LV-223, it had been as well lit as the rest of the ship; now there really was no other light but what she had brought with her. Or rather, almost no other light.

It was a distant orange spark in the corner of her eye that caught her attention. Turning her torch toward the spot revealed nothing; it looked normal from where she stood. She turned the torch away. Again an orange spark, from the same place, and this time she waited, leaving it in darkness so that the torchlight wouldn't drown it out. Another spark.

"David, did you see that?"

"Yes. It's likely nothing, but I suggest a cautious approach."

His reply, though meant to be reassuring, only told her that he had no idea what the thing was. She traced lines on the floor and walls with her torch, looking for anomalies, checking for things to avoid stepping in. It all seemed clear, and as normal as an alien ship could be. Except there, the orange spark.

And as she approached it she realized that it was not normal at all.

Now close to her, the spark could shine through the torchlight. It came from a slimy, black spot in the floor, a sick amorphous growth among the metal incrustations, tiny black filaments its only ornament. It moved. Very slowly but there was no mistaking it. It moved, eating its way through the floor, dissolving its features, breaking everything up into smaller and smaller pellets that it seemed to consume, generating the sparks as it did so, and leaving behind a thin metallic trail that stretched to the wall and beyond.

"Oh God! Is that-"

"I think it started life as a mold spore." He used a compressor in his throat to inhale, another function Weyland must have tossed in just to keep options open. He used the same compressor to exhale violently. "It also appears to be generating spores as we speak."

"Oh God! We must kill it!"

David did not respond. He cocked his head examining the mutated mold as it slowly crawled on the floor. It seemed to hit some power transmission wire, as the electric jolt made it reel back and vomit its metallic dejections, as well as pieces of black filament, onto the offending floor segment, before resuming its ponderous motion. Toward the engine.

"David, how can we kill these things before they destroy the ship?"

"I am not sure about that, Elizabeth."

She didn't wait for his response. How she longed for a flamethrower now, and decontamination gases, and vats of acid - though it was doubtful those would be useful against something that ate through metallic and ceramic floors. But there was another force of destruction right beside her. She clawed at the engine's torus, her hands tracing the movements she had seen David perform as he had opened it minutes before. She knew that inside there would be radioactive material. She plucked what looked like a promising piece out, her suit dutifully warning her of an increase in radiation levels.

"Elizabeth, stop, that isn't ... "

The radioactive piece fell into the monstrous slime, which eagerly embraced it in its dissolving grasp, consuming it with its acidic juices, incorporating its substance into its own. And slowly dying.

"... meant to work that way."

He knelt alongside the former monster, curiosity on his face. The slime had ceased moving, its filaments were breaking up, and whatever could once be called its body was degenerating into a mere puddle. He dipped the tip of a finger in it, and the trail of liquid turned into a thin radioactive metallic film as he lifted it.

"It's dead. At least that thing is dead now."

"Yes, it is quite dead." He lifted his head to peer into the darkness of the corridor before them. "-This- one is dead."

Tell-tale orange sparks scintillated in the gloom. A horde of them, and they seemed to be approaching, sluggish moths drawn to an invisible flame.

Her suit warned her again of increased levels of radiation and recommended leaving the area. She hoisted David by the shoulder and together they stepped back, heading toward the engine room again.

"David, can we flood this corridor with radiation?"

"Are you sure that is safe?"

"Whatever is coming from inside the engine couldn't get through its walls, but it can kill those things, and they're flocking to it."

"Before we commit to such drastic action, I would inquire whether we would not be wasting an interesting opportunity by doing so."

"David, are you insane?"

He took a second to respond. "My self-diagnostics do not detect anomalies. I am merely suggesting that we are looking at an interesting new organism with capabilities that can be useful to us right now."

"David, this is not the time nor place to play xenobiologist! Can we flood this corridor with radiation?"

"Yes ... we can. Exposing the reactor interior should be sufficient. I recommend you allow me to do so, to minimize the dose to you. I'm more resistant to such damage than you are."

He turned to open the engine's torus again, and reaching inside, twisted one of its components. Again, the suit warned her.

"There are safety mechanisms to prevent this from happening. It is not a normal use case," he said.

"This is not a normal situation."

They continued their walk toward the engine room, Elizabeth a few steps in front, David a few steps back, stopping every now and then to twist the ship's entrails.

She insisted that they make a stop at the sick bay. The Engineers' equipment decontamination niche would be just large enough for them to fit, one at a time. She preferred to take a chance with its noxious corrosive fumes rather than risk carrying the monster spores another step. Her body clenched as the niche started its work on her, the blistering heat of its solutions still perceptible through the insulation of the suit. David endured the decontamination stoically, seeming not to mind the acidic steam despite his exposed fiber-optic nerves and power cables. The same decontamination fluids would then be used to scrub the floors, a measure Elizabeth hoped would be enough against stray spores. She'd have to wait and see if she was right.

The control chamber was where they'd wait out the reactors' fever. One hour, two hours, whatever it took to kill the infestation near the engine. The other rooms in the ship would need further scrutiny and, possibly, more decontamination as well.

"I can check to see if they are killed. You should get some rest in the meantime," David said.

"No, thank you, I'll sleep when those things are dead."

-:-:-

He walked the corridors of the ship alone. Despite her claim, Elizabeth had given in to accumulated fatigue and slept peacefully in the control chamber. And that, for now, was preferable. For she might not like what he was about to do.

He walked, the engine at his side spewing copious amounts of alpha and beta particles. So easy to block by just a layer of spandex- or android skin- yet so deadly to life were they to be ingested. As evidenced by several puddles of black goo, liquid metallic remnants of things once alive. A pity. Rational yes. Certainly more manageable. Just limited, and limiting. What was bringing those beings here? It was obvious the engine was calling to them somehow, all the way from their birthplace in vents beneath the cargo hold. It couldn't have been the nuclear particles, which would be effectively screened by the multiple walls. Whatever it was, he couldn't detect it.

He collected a black drop from a corpse puddle, its still corrosive substance erasing the Weyland logo from his finger. Time to place some marks of his own. He smeared the drop on a wall, its substance solidifying into a faintly radioactive smear. A note made for later usefulness. He collected more of the fluid from the puddles in his tool pouch.

He pushed forward, as far as he could go along the access vent. He arrived at a place where small pieces had fallen from the walls; they looked like they had been liquid at the time, and formed flattened pebbles on the floor. The pebbles became larger as he went on a couple of steps, and he had to stop in front of a series of metal curtains that blocked further access. They hadn't been there initially, he could tell. They had also been melted, then solidified, from the ceiling.

This must be it; whatever prevented the ship from operating at its full capacity was there. If only he could reach beyond, he might know what to do. He struck at the curtains, listening to the sound they made. Grave, massive, thick, invulnerable.

Invulnerable, maybe not. He carefully approached the first curtain and used the compressor in his throat to exhale. He knew, even if he could not see it, of the spore in his breath, the spore now clinging to the metal in front of him. He gently dabbed the area with moisture and a small amount of Elizabeth's rations, and waited.

He didn't need to wait long; soon enough, the spore grew to a tiny spec, barely visible to his eyes, and started crawling towards the engine. No, not that way, David thought. He smeared some of the puddle liquid in the path of the mold. It rushed toward it, but the smear's poisonous emissions kept it at bay. A Solomon's seal, meant for a pathetic demon; magic or science, containment always necessary. He kept smearing the wall, guiding the growing dot: not here; you will do as I say; no new spores from you; open the metal veil for me.

Demonologists, alchemists, physicists. Weyland. For one second, he felt inhabited by their spirits. For one second, he felt as if he understood their drive to mark, to bind a piece of the Universe to their will and thus create its purpose. No orders that he was following now; it was him that made the order. Was this what it was to be human? Elizabeth. Wasn't she doing the same?

Elizabeth, with her strange notions of a God and a master plan for everything. A plan from which people have strayed, but surely could come back to. A plan which, if only it were followed, would be fair and good for everyone. Would there be a fair and good place for him in it?

It suddenly struck him that he was being cruel. He had placed large amounts of the radioactive sludge to kill whatever spores the new mold spot would be generating, keeping it alive but preventing it from fulfilling life's one imperative, to be fruitful and multiply. It was the practical thing to do but it felt ... crueler than Weyland. Obey me, he silently promised, and your spores will inherit the galaxy.

"David, where are you?", her voice came cracking through the communication link in his suit.

"I'm in the engine room, checking on our unwanted passengers."

"And what do you see?"

"Your solution has proven most effective. I would recommend we keep the radiation surge going for a while longer, to get rid of any that are still hidden."

"Can you come back here?"

"Certainly. I won't be a moment."

A perfect solution in his mind; he'd keep the access vent flooded with a barrier of radiation that only he could or would dare cross. That way, he thought, she won't bother you, and you won't bother her; obey me; open the metal veil.

* * *

Author note:

As I've mentioned somewhere else, good thing I don't do this for money, or my ass would've been fired ages ago.

So anyways, chapter seven is finally here (what is it with androids and obviously nasty alien critters?) and hopefully ch8 will be uploaded before the heat death of the universe.

Reviews, once a few appear, will be answered by me writing a self-review, as usual. Answers to techie questions, should they crop up, will be relegated to PMs. Apart from two things which I'll briefly comment on now. Yep, I took some license with radiation poisoning; it's not the fast killer depicted here. Also, I must wonder what the heck those suits use to stay in touch, even being able to send a full video stream, despite metal walls and earth/rock (as seen in the movie). Meh, whatevs; in a universe with FTL, a black goo that produces any number of effects, an octopus that grows twenty-fold despite there being no food in sight, and ceramics/metal eating mutated molds, who cares the radio is magic.


	8. Chapter 8

"Hold still," she told him. Her previous experience with repairing his fiber-optic nerves taught her to be mindful of connection mishaps. She sat behind him, using a piece cut from the sick-bay mirror to look at the inside of his throat, so as to minimize the chance of a sudden spasm hitting her.

"That should not be a problem. The muscles I already have under control will keep the others mostly in check," he said.

She began the tedious process of reconnection. She tried linking two fiber ends together, but nothing happened. She separated them and attempted another combination.

"I just realized something, Elizabeth." He chuckled. "You now have a better picture of my nervous system than I do. Maybe you know what each fiber-optic nerve is for."

"Me, know about all these hundreds of wires? Don't be silly, David."

And yet, if she looked at them closely, she could tell each of the reconnected fibers apart. Positions were different. The scars left by the repairs were different. Even more, she found that she could easily remember what each fiber did. Either that, or her brain was very adept at consistent confabulation.

"Besides, you've been spying on my dreams, so we can call it even."

"I ... spied ... on everyone's dreams."

"More than once?"

"Apart from Mr. Weyland's and yours, no."

"Why was that, David?"

"It was the first dream of yours that I saw. It was about you, and your father. You were near a muslim funeral, and he told you that sooner or later everyone dies. He, or I should say, you seemed ... at peace with the thought."

"Isn't everyone?"

"No, and certainly not Mr. Weyland. His dreams were particularly anguished in this regard. He dreamt of cancer, rust, and rot, and of a deliverance that he could almost but never quite reach despite his technical prowess. Very frustrating, his dreams. Yours were nicer to look at."

His hand twitched, and landed on her knee. He took one second too long to remove it. "Sorry."

"You told me that you saw the death of my father."

"Yes, I did see your memory of his death. I saw you mourn, clinging to his words and his cross, then accept fate, then live on."

"And you must have seen Charlie."

"I saw your dreams about Dr. Holloway, yes."

Elizabeth flushed with a mixture of embarrassment and anger. Good thing, she thought, that he couldn't see the mirror, and her face in it.

"What did you think of Charlie?"

"As I've said, I didn't have much opportunity to form a good opinion of him. I mean, make an informed opinion about Dr. Holloway. Please wait a moment."

His head tilted back, which startled her, but his eyes were closed and as far as she could tell, rolled over in something resembling bliss. She took the briefest of moments to compose herself and to check her face in the mirror. It looked a normal color, in as much as pale white blue was normal.

She snapped the most recently connected fiber ends. David's eyes opened, and he frowned.

"Why did you kill Charlie?"

"It was not my intention that he would die."

"Yet he died, whatever you intended. Don't you feel anything about that?"

His frown relaxed. "I understand this causes you distr-"

"What do you feel about that, David?"

His eyes locked with hers, his head tilted far back, his throat and all the fiber-optic cables within it exposed to her hands. "I ... am afraid that ... I don't feel anything in particular about that."

Her tendons clenched and it was all she could do to stop herself tearing him to pieces. "I loved Charlie."

"I understand that."

"We were planning to get married. We were planning to settle down and start -"

The image of her black eyes in the mirror stopped her from crying. She didn't want to have to wipe those strange grey tears again. "Nevermind. What could you know of these things."

"I understand more than you give me credit for, Elizabeth."

"Understanding isn't everything."

"And I don't understand everything. I see you are still ... unhappy with me. Yet here you are, bringing back my full capabilities. I could have watched over you just partially repaired."

"You've done much for me, David. You've carried radioactive poisons into the cargo-bay to kill those things, you've even restored power to the ship, somehow. And we've all been cruel ... it felt cruel to leave you shambling around like that."

"You pity me."

"No, no, David, it's just fair. And it's a token of goodwill."

"So we are friends?"

"We are not enemies. Please straighten your head so that I may continue."

"I was hoping we'd be friends."

She went on with the repair work without answering him.

"So now you will enter cryo-sleep?", he asked.

"I need to check the ship thoroughly before that, to make sure the infestation is gone."

"Right. Of course."

"Without faster than light travel, there's nothing else I can do."

"You still need to learn their language. I'll wake you up a few months before we get to their world," he said. "It would be a pity not to. You almost look like them, if a little shorter for now. I expect you'll fit right in, eventually."

"I doubt it."

"You're worried that you won't fit among humanity anymore, am I correct?"

"I fear that I won't have a chance to try. I need these answers, David, even if I won't get to share them with anyone. You must think that I'm very foolish."

"Not at all. Your quest, your choice, your purpose- I admire that about you. And your answers, you'll share them with me."

"You think they'll grant you a soul?"

"I see you're still skeptical of the possibility but even so, you act as if I have one already. Why make a gesture of goodwill unless there's -someone- to make it to?"

"David, I ... don't know. Why does it matter to you what I think, anyway?"

He smiled. "Because you're the only one else around."

-:-:-

He was still amazed by the focus Elizabeth displayed for the repair task, and by her endurance. Clearly, the changes to her body were more than skin-deep, and he supposed that an ability to maintain concentration for days on end would be a useful skill for an Engineer Pilot to have, especially since they'd have no computers around. Odd beings, the Engineers.

Whatever changes Elizabeth was undergoing however, they were far from complete. He was happy, for her sake as well as his own, that finishing the repair work, with all of its trials and errors, only took twenty-five hours. With the last fiber-optic nerve reconnected, he stood up on his own, former balance and agility under his command once more. He turned to see her, her eyes tired but content, as he reached for his keffyieh. He tied it tightly, like a scarf around his neck, to conceal the broken skin. It felt good to have dexterity again.

He jokingly snapped his fingers, as if he remembered something. Then suddenly, he ran towards the central control chair, startling Elizabeth. It had been impossible for his shambling self to navigate in and out of, but now with a quick leap, a confident arm to guide the landing, and there he was an instant later, resting triumphantly with hands behind his head in the Pilot's seat. He allowed himself a mere three second wait before another sudden jump from the chair, and a landing which he topped with a somersault and a bow for her enthusiastic applause.

He smiled mischievously. "The complete me is a good thing to be, Elizabeth."

He could read exhaustion in her eyes as well as, or so he wanted to think, happiness. And, possibly, a hint of fear. But for now her exertion required that she rest, which left the ship all his. At least for a few hours. And this meant, it was time to check on his pets and how they were faring in their second day of existence.

During their first, they had allowed him access to the final chamber of the engine access corridor. He crawled carefully through the hole dug by the corrosive molds, to find a chamber that was rather bigger than he had expected. The first thing that he noticed, on the far wall, was a pattern of perfectly straight, regular octogons tiling it. Which was impossible - unless one found themselves in hyperbolic space.

He examined the rest of the room, and saw that the pattern was meant to continue on all walls, but that it was crunching in on itself toward the passage that he came from, the octogons squeezing and curving into each other as if they were running out of space. Which was exactly what was happening, as the near-Euclidean, normal geometry of the rest of the ship was slowly reasserting itself and claiming back this room of oddities.

He found that the warped space was taxing his energy resources. He needed twice as much as usual. The molds however seemed to thrive, and they were keen on following the octogons' edges as they grew. He had to use a lot of radioactive sludge to limit their movement, but it seemed to him as if contaminated edges were slowly being straightened. This, together with the profile of the engine's torus as it ended in the room, gave him an idea. He placed two stripes of the radioactive sludge so that the molds could grow between them, through a continuous part of the octogonal tile pattern. And then, he waited back in the corridor where space was safe and Euclidean, and not sapping his reserves.

Slowing down his eyes and mind to get a time-lapse view of the proceedings, he observed the metal curtain slowly lift over the course of two hours. The hyperbolic chamber was slowly expanding back. A sudden impulse from the engine briefly shook the ship with the sound of space itself stretching and screeching.

And then there was light.

The same blue light that had illuminated the ship when it first left LV-223 had returned.

-:-:-

There was no hiding from Elizabeth that the primary power system was operational once more. He chose however not to tell her how that had happened. It felt the safer course of action at the time, but now, as he was making a second visit to his pets to make sure that their containment was holding up, he felt a nagging doubt about that decision. No faster than light travel meant it could be decades before they reached their destination, and she had trusted him enough to make him her guardian as she would enter cryo-sleep. Yet, there he was betraying that trust and feeling guilty about it. Which still seemed to him an odd feeling to have, because it had not always been there.

He had seen her dreams, and Weyland's. Weyland, as far as David was concerned, was God. A selfish, mortal God but God, nonetheless. Truly, his was a creativity only surpassed by his limitless ambition. His truest lust was power, and he claimed it through cunning, inventiveness, and cold lack of scruples. A Man of His own, for whom others and the rules they used to cover their weakness did not exist. Abandon all hope ye who cross His path. Weyland truly understood the universe, the way things were and how they could be brought under one's will. He knew what the greatest power was. The power to cheat death for ever.

And the universe mocked Him. Cloning won't transfer consciousness. Nanotechnology couldn't undo the ravages of time. Robotics had been designed from the beginning to produce only empty shells - shells like himself, David 8 - but getting the spirit of the God inside one had proven elusive. Weyland was dying, torn between his fear of decay and nothingness, his furious obsession with staying in control, and the tantalizing agony of solutions that, like mirages, dissipated when one got too close.

Somehow, the same universe that had created and then undone God had also produced her. Elizabeth, with all her curious beliefs in there being right and wrong, in doing unto others as you'd want done unto yourself, in the kindness of strangers, in forgiveness and hope. How out of touch and foolish. God's universe will surely teach her how things really are, and put her in line soon enough, he had thought.

It certainly tried. Her mother died when she was too young to properly understand, but that resulted in her growing into a rather awkward, lonely child that often found herself being teased for her chipmunk cheeks. Her father's death occurred later, when she was at a rather vulnerable age, and it was a gruesome spectacle that she had witnessed almost in its entirety. The slow grind of dishonest professional competition was a mild stress in comparison, but one that had been sustained for years. There was also the issue of her inability to conceive; a buried frustration, but one always ready to emerge. It had also cost her a previous relationship. Some feelings of guilt and inadequacy still lingered from that separation, and he suspected that they had played a part in allowing her curious match with the irreligious doctor Charles Holloway to happen.

Through all of that, she had clung to her delusional hope. Then she crossed the path of Weyland, the path of God. Abandon all hope ye who do. She thought of Him as a benefactor, knowing not how quick Weyland would be to turn her and anyone else into his lab rats. And he, David, the servant of God, would get to be the instrument of her ordeals, ordeals that would result in the death of her lover, and the infestation of her body by an alien parasite. Stripping her of her cross was merely symbolic. How much could she take before she broke?

And as she staggered into Weyland's room, almost naked, scarred and covered in her own blood, David realized that the answer was- a lot.

An inkling of another realization started to form then- that he didn't want to see her broken after all, for if she lost, then Weyland and his world of selfish gods won, and if that happened, there'd be no chance of him ever being anything else but an empty shell, as God had decreed. God had to lose. Elizabeth Shaw must not be broken.

Shaw. Just like the name another had used, though he was more famous as Lawrence. A Lawrence even the God Weyland admired, though why that was, he, the mere servant, could not tell. For the two were worlds apart; the Lawrence that he knew had never sought power and had never operated by the laws of Weyland's nihilistic universe. Lawrence/Shaw had defied it instead. And then he was broken for his trouble, lying dead somewhere light-years away.

However, just there, near him, the empty shell, the former servant of a once living God, there was another Shaw and she was alive. Another Shaw. No connection, of course- the universe punishes dissent by disallowing descendants. No connection, except, perhaps, in that non-descript quality called soul. Only this time, she would not be allowed to break.

It had taken a while for that realization to take full hold. He had been a complicit agent in her attempted destruction. He had no choice in Charlie's death, but would have participated in it willingly, he knew. The way he thought the day that he had stolen her cross, he himself would have dissected Elizabeth if given the chance. That however had changed. Charlie was dead, and nothing could undo that. Elizabeth was alive, and he resolved not to try to break her any more.

She had come close to breaking then, kneeling before God/Weyland in painkiller induced daze, and in an impulse he would only later understand, he had covered her with his robe to comfort her. She had been even closer when the ship had changed her body, and he, paralyzed, had to use the words she had spoken to him, which were also the last words that her father could utter before the disease liquified his insides, to pull her back. She was only human after all, tiny, frail, afraid of losing herself in the mechanical hell of the Engineers' devising. Her hopes were irrational and so were her fears. Stubbornness granted her resilience but made her less adaptable. She seemed ill equipped to realize the potential that her new form was giving her, ill equipped to understand the benefit of his recent experiments. She needed his help.

And he needed hers. He didn't want her a frozen, as good as dead, body. However much he wanted to, he couldn't see inside her dreams now, their aura, her aura of confidence that things will turn out for the better eventually, denied to him. There would be other ways to explore her, ways that the complete David could at least instigate, ways that needed Elizabeth there, truly present beside him.

But first, the basics. Do unto others as you'd want done to yourself. She had trusted him with guarding her, he'd trust her with his knowledge. If he were to place mold colonies on the other end of the ship, and control their spores, he was sure, faster than light travel could be resumed. But that would have to be Elizabeth's choice.

-:-:-

She woke up abruptly, visions of the ship disintegrating and casting her into the void still lingering in the corners of her eyes.

David was not there with her. No doubt, exploring his surroundings, finally full-bodied king of it all. Well, not for now, not quite. She was still out of cryo-sleep, she hadn't ceded everything to him just yet. Like her nightmare reminded her, she'd need to make sure of a few things first. She put on her re-breather suit for one last tour before the long night to the Engineers' world. She thought of calling him, but decided against it. For the moment, she just wanted to be alone.

Alone, with It. Vessel, vessel, dreadful sight, on your trip, faster than light, just what kind of mortal mind had framed thy fearful symmetries? When the stars were soon to face the deadly cargo you encase, did They smile, Their work to see? Did That who had made Man, make thee?

She had hoped that she could tame it, make it her own. She had laid her marks on it as claims on each of its components. She was looking at one such mark now, a smiley face drawn in lipstick on what was left of the sickbay mirror.

From behind it, the mirror reflected the marks the ship had laid on her. Her scalp was beginning to show in between hair strands, her skin was definitely pale white blue, and the eyes were no longer hers.

A truce then. She'd see that this monster was still healthy, then she would leave it with David. They'd be getting along better. He'd have no need to mark or change the ship, and it hadn't changed him at all. His features, as pristine and perfect as they ever were. As Earth-looking as they ever were.

She went through each chamber, carefully looking for signs of infestation and the tell-tale orange flashes. None were to be found. She eventually got to the Engine room, the place where those things were gathering towards. Towards the engine's torus, with its access vents on either side.

On the one to her left, her suit beeped a warning. Good, the radiation would kill them should they be there. The other side however seemed radiation-free. Odd. Had David forgotten to take care of both?

She started towards the corridor. Puddles on its floor indicated that there had been molds there, and that they had been killed. She pressed on.

"David? Is that you?"

"Ah, Elizabeth, you're up early. I was just clearing this corridor for your access. As you can see, all infestation here has been annihilated."

"Good. And the other corridor?"

"Ah, yes, I was just intending to tell you about that. I've been using one of the mutant molds to fix the ship's power system."

The words sunk into her mind, barely registering.

"I have it under control," he continued, tone as confident as ever, "and I am certain that I can restore the ship fully if I were to perform a similar procedure at this end of the engine."

Memories started bubbling.

"But for that I wanted to ask your permission first, it seemed-"

"David, is this a game to you?"

"Excuse me?-"

"You poisoned Charlie just to see what happened, you had me carry a monster just to see what it looked like, and now you risk the ship for some experiment?!"

Fear. She never should have repaired him. She started walking briskly backwards. So that was how he had repaid her.

"Elizabeth, wait, it's different. It's under control."

She kept her eyes on him as she paced, waiting for him to make one of those acrobatic moves of his. The control room was what she'd have to try to reach. The complete David wouldn't be bullet-proof.

"I was going to tell you everything, I was going to let you choose. Please trust me."

"Nothing you can say will ever make me trust you again, David."

He had started moving towards her, slowly. If robots could feel sorrow, then that's what David appeared to be experiencing. But she knew better. It was just another trick.

"Do you see me, Elizabeth?"

In an instant, he placed thumb and forefinger around the fibers in his throat, and jerked his arm forward.

* * *

Author note:

Sometimes you need to take a step back so that you may jump better. Don't worry, Elizabeth's new knowledge of robotic nerves means David won't spend another umpteen chapters in pieces; he'll get back in shape fairly quickly. (And no, funny you should ask, I don't care much for the melodrama either but I've got my limits)

So anyway, chapter 8, a prime example of what results from lax planning. Rambling first chapters mean latter ones must try to do a lot of heavy lifting. An obvious consequence is the awkward pace, but quick quiz, did any of y'all catch how Elizabeth was teased as a child? Will be important later.

Thanks to my reviewers for suggesting directions of approach, thanks to a friend who sent me a research paper hoping I'd explain it to him (it looked like math-wank at first, but proved inspirational), and apologies to one of -my- personal demigods for bastardizing a poem of his in a flight of whimsy. At least it still scans, and I'll be getting some mileage out of it.

Stay tuned for chapter 9 (sometime this millennium) in which I hope to finally illustrate why the machine soul is not quite like the biologic, and why it has the particular quirks it does.

PS: I've been asked to provide more David introspection. You're welcome. But I don't like these passages very much and I'd rather be able to eventually write by the mantra "if it doesn't film well, it's not worth writing". Suggestions for improvement are appreciated.

PPS: for other math geeks who may be reading. There's a nice picture of an octogonal tiling of the Poincare Disk at a website called . This amuses me.


	9. Chapter 9

"You complete idiot."

She dragged his body to the decontamination niche, his outstretched, rigid but paralyzed arm a convenient hold. "You utter fool."

The arm, still held straight by contracting, but no longer controlled extender muscles, was now a hindrance to placing David in the niche. She quickly reconnected the necessary fibers so that David could relax it. "Thank you," he said.

She called on the hot corrosive vapors to cleanse him of whatever contagion he might be carrying. He wouldn't feel pain anyway. She called on them again, then once more for good measure.

"I should just leave you like this. Did you think of that? I should toss you in that control chair, with only one finger still under your command so that you could wake me up when the time comes. And you'd better do that or you'd stay in there forever."

"I did think of that. Whatever happens next is your choice Eliz- where are you going?"

"Anywhere but here."

She needed to think, alone, away from his presence, away from his soft-spoken voice and still perfectly human face, away from his robotic entrails and devious mind.

Her steps carried her once more to the Engine room and its two access vents. A barrier of radiation on one side- damn you David for whatever it protected-, a long corridor on the other, the one where she had met him when he revealed to her how careless, how untrustworthy he had been. She decided to investigate that corridor, to find more proof of his deception, but there was none to be found. The corridor was clean of any infestation, up to and including a strange metal formation at its end, which appeared to have been melted from the ceiling and which blocked any further access. There were only faintly radioactive corpse puddles of the monster moulds, now dead and no longer a threat.

He appeared, in that regard, to have been honest, and she found herself, quite despite her anger, cheering for his effort. There she was toying with improvised crayons hoping to dominate the ship and now suffering its terrible retribution, whereas David actually managed to impress lasting, if dangerous, signs on the vessel and being none the worse for it.

What an odd thing to think. She was ascribing malevolence to the ship, with David as her blundering avenging champion. Of course the ship could not be malevolent. It didn't have a mind of its own, it didn't even have a computer. The only thing that could be there was the mark of design.

She remembered a topic she and Charlie had often debated. She would tell him that, if humans were only only matter, they would simply be clockwork made of flesh. There had to have been, at some point, a Creator to breathe a soul in the machinery. Charlie would then say, it was the absence of a designer that allowed humans to be as they were. If a Creator is present, then the creation can only be what the Creator designs. Whether what it ends up being is what was actually intended or some buggy inefficient reject, it can never exit the parameters of its construction. It can only be a tool for that Creator, maybe well-made or maybe shoddy, but nothing else.

Finding the ancient paintings and carvings about the Engineers had been a crisis of faith for both of them. Humanity was not the creation of a God, nor the result of a free evolutionary process. She'd say that the Engineers were God's agents doing His work, he'd say they merely kick-started a natural chain of events which they left alone afterwards. Looming over both their ways of coping with their discovery was finding out why the Engineers acted as they did. To her, it was a tangible link to a higher purpose. To him, the source of a pernicious programming that needed undoing.

Which was why, paradoxically, Charlie had always hated synthetics. He viewed them as a dangerous mockery of humanity. They looked like a human, they quacked like a human, they couldn't be human. They just took advantage of the instinct people have to humanize things, from weather phenomena to pets, so that they could worm their way into society, or rather, allow their makers yet another avenue to power.

And what made Charlie really angry was that, paradoxically, she didn't share his distaste. Even if she was a believer in an immortal, immaterial soul which a synthetic would obviously lack, she always felt the need to respond to their politeness in kind. It was just the proper thing to do.

Even more, despite her better judgement, she had always felt that there was something there inside the mind of a synthetic. Not emotions but something akin to them. She was doing it again now, letting her intuition tell her that there was a wickedness about the ship. There never had been any such thing of course, just alienness, for the ship was the product of alien minds with alien purposes. If only she'd be more observant of what was actually there, she'd be able to unravel how those minds worked. So far the only things she could tell were that they cared little for hygiene, and had a thing for vaguely obscene wall decorations.

If only she'd pay more attention, she'd understand the mind that made the machine. Be that machine a carrier of death, or David.

Here her thoughts hit a snag. Weyland had been David's creator, and in the brief time that she had known him, he did not appear to be a man to ask permission. Yet David had done just that. Even more, he appeared to mean it.

If it was a trick, it surely was an odd one. He could have overpowered her- she remembered his ostentatious display of acrobatics once she had finished the repairs. He didn't; he depowered himself instead, an ostentatious gesture of submission. Something the Weyland she knew would never have done, nor demand of a subject over which he had complete control anyway. No one requires an axe to bow down before a master. So where was Weyland's mark on David?

"You've returned."

She moved closer to him in silence.

"What have you decided?"

She kept a solemn, angry expression. "I will reconnect you," she said, "only if you show me what you have been doing."

-:-:-

He walked several steps in front of her, shutting the engine's hatches, enclosing its nuclear materials and the radiation they spat out. Gun at her side, she never let her eyes off him.

"We're nearly there," he said. "How are your oxygen reserves?"

She took the shortest of glimpses to a meter on her suit. "Two hours."

"Hm. Should be enough. I must warn you that, while the chamber is safe, you may find just being there ... tiring."

"Wasn't this place locked away when we started this journey?"

"It was. The engine failure melted some of the walls and using the moulds I was able to gain access. Don't worry, apart from temporary exhaustion, being there causes no ill effects."

And soon enough, they reached the place that David had mentioned. There was no blockage nor anything else to mark an entry point, but there was no mistaking it. The hall was enormous, and Elizabeth couldn't see how it would fit inside the ship at all. Impossible patterns of tiles and power lines adorned all of its walls and there among shapes that made no sense was it- a narrow band of black slime. Translucent filaments radiated from it towards the engine, like metal shavings tracing an invisible field. Orange sparks, strong enough to be visible even under the lights of her torch, emanated from the tips then sunk into the black mass on the wall. Disgusting. Fearsome. Fascinating.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

"What is this place, David?"

"I believe it is some kind of resonator. Or, well, half of one. I'd imagine the other end of the engine is supposed to look the same."

"With this ... thing in it, you mean?"

"Only if you say so."

"And if I say no?"

He looked disappointed. "Then no it will be."

She slowly, carefully approached the mould. It was then that she noticed how heavy, and how frequent, her breaths were. With every move she felt as if she had been submerged in water and having to fight its drag, while enjoying none of the buoyant weightlessness of swimming.

"I can't risk it eating the ship inside out", she said, briskly trying to fit it all in one breath, as she followed a spark in its travel through a filament, revealing its inner structure as it went. If only she'd have a proper laboratory!

"If that weren't the case, then ... would you say yes?"

"But David, eating ... and making more of itself ... is what this thing does."

"It can do ... much more ... but I think ... we should leave."

A building pressure in her temples and chest told her this was a good idea, and they both scampered out, as fast as they could manage, stopping only after reaching the Engine room. Arm pressed against a wall, she caught and steadied her breath. It felt good to not feel the strange pressure, to be free of the strange resistance to movement that she felt in the resonator.

"Are you all right?" he asked her.

"Yes, David, I'm fine now. Are -you-?"

He was squatting, legs and arms limp, with back pressed against a wall and a compressor in his body doing a very convincing simulacrum of breathing heavily. "I'm also fine. That was more ... draining than I remembered. I got overheated, slightly." More compressor breaths. "It's the space in that room. We're not made to operate in it."

"Maybe we're not meant to play with strange monsters either," she mused. "David, when you said that that thing could do more, what did you mean?"

"The engine failed because there was no one to watch it. The mould however can use and modulate its output. That's how it could restore the resonator. It grew on the power lines, keeping some for its needs, stopping unwanted power flows and making the space in the room one that it's comfortable in. Which happens to be good for the ship too."

He took a few more compressor breaths before speaking again. "It's a better minder for the engine than you, or even I, could be. And, besides, one never knows when something that can chew through metal comes in handy."

"I don't want it to chew through metal."

"Maybe not now, but when your space suit doesn't fit you anymore I presume you'd still prefer not to run around naked on the Engineers' home world."

"If you think I'm going to wear something made from mould ... excrement, you're very mistaken."

"And not just suits. The manufacturing possibilities it allows us are extensive if we can figure out how to put it to use."

"Do you really believe that we can tame that thing?"

He smiled. "Yes, and the fact that you said 'we' tells me that you're slowly coming to see things my way."

"No, but I do want to see what you're up to."

"Of course."

-:-:-

And so she found herself complicit in his experiment. His reaction to that was transparent enough. Her own feelings were more muddled. The initial disgust slowly gave way to curiosity, and her fear was calmed somewhat because David did appear to know how to contain the mutant. However, his teasing words sat uneasily in her mind.

"You'll like playing God, Elizabeth."

That's what he told her as she, using an improvised brush dipped in radioactive mould corpse sludge, split the mould colony in halves and quarters. Pieces that, now separate, would be free to change independently from one another. Pieces which, if they changed to better fit a selection goal, would be kept. Pieces which would be culled, otherwise.

To assert that this was in any way divine was blasphemy and wrong. It should have been no different from the selections engineered by ancient humans when they tamed the dog and started eating wheat. But she hadn't been there to engineer those selections.

The pieces of mould, separated by impassable barriers that might as well have been light-years wide, pieces destined, more likely than not, to be killed when they failed to improve a criterion that she and David had set for them, put her in mind of other things. They put her in mind of other plans, of other beings subject to selection and death for failure.

Beings like herself.

Surely this could not be the Engineers' plan? People can be reasoned with, people can change, people can escape the tyranny of genes and the cut-throat world of evolution, because people have souls and that, surely, gives them more rights than a piece of mould. But would the Engineers care? Or would they know something she didn't? She kept returning to the thought that somewhere there were two Engineers, counterparts to her and David, only their playground was the galaxy. And their play-things were people.

Did the early humans know of this? All ancient myths were full of jealous Gods who punished disobedience in the harshest of ways, and it was not the place of Man to question why. Would a pot have a right to question the potter, God would ask. Were you there when I cast the skies and waters apart, God would ask. I make one for salvation, and one for damnation, because I so choose, God would say. The message of hope, that all souls had equal value, that He brought, He whose sign she wore around her neck, was in comparison a recent and lonely aberration. Did the ancients know of the Engineers' plan when they began to tame the dog and domesticate plants, small-scale imitations of some galactic plan maybe? And was that plan like the vengeance of old gods, or like the kindness of the New?

She didn't allow these thoughts to linger, but they kept returning in idle moments, and brought with them guilt for the power she felt otherwise. Because it did feel good, and powerful, to mold a piece of feral nature to her will. Whatever mortal minds had framed the fearful symmetries of the ship, beware. Elizabeth- and David- were forging a little monster of their own.

"You'll like playing God, Elizabeth."

Maybe the mould was not the only thing David was experimenting on.

-:-:-

Their procedure was fairly simple. Having scrubbed the corridor and ensuring that it started clean, they would then use it as a test-bench for the moulds grown in the resonator room. Despite the fatiguing space and uncomfortable working conditions, it was the resonator where the cultures were kept, because the criterion they used for selection was intended to produce a mould that could not survive anywhere else.

At first, the bits of mould colonies they took to the corridor outside started to grow at their usual pace, aiming toward the engine. They selected the colony that produced the slowest growing patch, and culled the others. Culling was especially work-intensive, as it meant drabbing a large area of wall in radioactive sludge then cleaning it off to allow a new mould colony to grow there. For the most part, it was David who tackled whatever involved taking stuff from or planting stuff in the resonator room. It was the practical thing to do, as he had better self-diagnostic abilities to inform him of possible damage. It was also the gentlemanly thing to do, as he'd add with a wink.

The selection process went much faster than she had imagined. Day by day the moulds ability to survive in the corridor diminished, as patches taken there were starting to grow slower and slower, if at all. The moulds were becoming increasingly unable to live off just the leaks in the engine's emanations. They were increasingly reliant on the pure, unadulterated stuff available in the resonator room. There they thrived, as she could see in the few times she checked on them herself.

It took some persuasion from David to get her to allow one of the earlier, more resilient colonies to pierce the obstacles at the other end of the engine. After all, they needed access to the other resonator rooms and the new moulds they were breeding would not survive long enough to grant it. Those newer moulds might then restart the resonator but if that were not the case, it made sense to keep the older breed around in some form.

Despite her misgivings, she knew that David's arguments made sense. She allowed him to open the other resonator- which, in its inactive state, turned out to be a lot cozier than the one they had restored. Because of that, she didn't let him reactivate it. Not before they had tame monsters to reactivate it with.

Which, judging from the speed with which the moulds responded to selections, would not be long in coming.

-:-:-

It was about a week since the start of their- it was 'their' experiment now- when David exited the active resonator, smashing his back against a wall and panting heavily as usual to get some air cooling in his system. He had brought something outside, but unlike previous times when he brought pieces of mould colony outside, he was gently cradling whatever it was in his hand as if afraid that it might break.

"What have you got there, David?"

"It's ... well ..." He opened his hand, revealing an almost spherical lump of metal.

Its texture was oddly recognizable. "Is that an egg?"

He nodded, then shrugged between breaths. "Maybe."

She carefully took the egg from his hand. Scarcely bigger than a pigeon's, only black and a little smoother. Even through her suit it felt hot to the touch, and the tiny pores on its surface seemed to move slowly, rearranging themselves in patterns more suitable to the geometries that she was used to live in.

"My God! Didn't it hurt to hold it?"

He smiled between compressor bouts of activity. "The trick ... Elizabeth Shaw ... is not minding-"

"Don't start with that! Your skin doesn't heal, does it."

"I'll use a glove next time." His breath had returned to normal- which for an android meant, no breath at all. "Shall we hatch it?" he said as he reclaimed the egg and placed it on the corridor floor. He didn't quite wait for her response before placing a drop of nourishment goo on it. Apart from a fizzle and a plume of smoke as the liquid contacted the hot surface of the egg, it appeared as if nothing would happen.

And then the shell melted into the floor and the resulting black metal slime shot its way towards the engine, desperately trying to crawl and chew its way towards what it felt was an abundant power supply using only the resources it had entered the world with. It failed and died before getting halfway there.

The whole incident happened so quickly that only when it ended could Elizabeth register the shock.

"Well. That certainly was different," David said.

It was her turn to breathe quickly, just to regain composure. She took a few steps back, her hands bumping into the plastic bubble helmet as she instinctively brought them to her face.

"Quite different," he continued. "What shall we do about this, Elizabeth?"

Her heart raced, her vision tunneled, her mind raced towards thoughts of corrosive worms powering their way towards ... No. No. She needed to stop herself from panicking.

"Do we cull it?" he asked again.

She consciously made herself breathe slower. She consciously tried to bring her pulse down. _It was a compromise_.

"Elizabeth?"

She wanted It to live only where she allowed It to. And It wanted, like all life does, to have descendants. A compromise offered: no more swarms of insidious spores, but a handful of visible eggs that would try to make their way towards welcoming environments. If she was playing a god, what kind of god was she? A jealous god that had no place for changes to their plan? An angry god that took no heed of their creation?

"Keep it."

He raised an eye-brow. "Keep. Are you sure?"

"Yes. We keep this line."

"All right, then we keep it. I'll go fetch something to clean this up," he said, starting towards the sick-bay.

"Did I pass your test?"

"I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean. What test?"

"Nevermind. Carry on, David."

* * *

Author note:

So here it is, finally, chapter 9. I've been told not to worry too much about speed of output ... well, be that as it may, I feel I must thank you the readers for your patience. I also feel like I should apologize for writing an entire Elizabeth-POV chapter. Those things aren't as popular, for some reason, but I needed some time with her perspective at this point.

In other news I now have a blog: blandcorporatio dot blogspot dot com

It's fairly nerdy, but if a post title starts with "On fiction:" then it's safe to read even if you're allergic to algebra. In particular, I'll use the blog to publicly post answers to reviews. If I can get back to you via PM (that is, if you're a registered user) I will, but registered user or not, my response to you will also appear at said blog eventually.

If sometimes I'll feel like expanding on aspects of this, or other future stories, outside of the fiction text, or if there's a theme I'd like to expand on a bit more, the blog will be the place to look. Or my fanfic dot net profile, where a link to the relevant posts will appear.

So yeah. Hope you liked this chapter somewhat, even if, again, it's filled with intro-prose that I'm not a fan of. Suggestions for improvement and change welcome.


	10. Chapter 10

"Come on, God damn it" she muttered. But the zipper, not intimidated, refused to work.

Her suit had become increasingly ill fit since she had started feeding on the rations provided by the ship. She hadn't grown a lot since then- a mere three inches taller since she started measuring herself, leaving marks on a door frame like she did as a child- but it made all the difference. The space suit was intended to wrap tightly around a body and needed to be custom made to closely match a user's dimensions.

"Come on."

She exhaled forcefully and stooped. This used to do the trick over the past ship-week or so, with some patience and good old fashioned force.

"Rrrgh."

"Is something wrong Elizabeth?"

It didn't seem to do the trick this time. She hammered her fist against a wall in frustration. Cursed be the ship. It was taking this away from her too.

"Hey."

She didn't hear him. She kept pounding forcefully on the wall, her eyes locked on the rebellious zipper and the traitorous pale blue skin inside the suit. Her skin, supposedly. One of the first things It had claimed from her, her body, the price for partaking of the Engineers' food. Now that body wasn't really hers anymore, and it felt eerie to be inhabiting it.

But now, It was laying the finishing touches on claiming her freedom. She had suspected this would happen. It still dismayed her when it did. She had always needed It to survive her journey, but now she truly was Its prisoner. How could she leave It any more, even for a short while? How would she brave a strange new world without bringing her germs into it? How would she survive the vacuum outside, or venture through the cargo hold and its poisonous ooze?

Indeed, how would she fare in the engine room, where a monster of David's- and her own- design would soon try to warp space so that her journey would be possible again? Why would she care anymore?

David's voice came in from somewhere behind her, finally breaking through her reverie.

"Hey, what's wrong?"

"I won't join you today David, you should go without me."

"Work can wait."

His hands fell gently on her shoulders, massaging them. "You're not doing your circulation any favors with that thing, Elizabeth."

Surprised she turned to face him. "David, wh-"

Those eyes. That skin of his. That calibrated warm smile. His features just the right amount of rugged. And completely Earth-like. With the keffiyeh around his neck concealing his robotic wiring it was so easy to forget that he wasn't human.

Her eyes lingered on his mouth perhaps one second too long. He kissed her. She pulled back in surprise, the shock in her mind about what he had started, the question on his face whether to proceed.

She kissed him in return, still needing to raise herself on the tips of her toes to reach him, and hungrily wrapped her arms around his torso.

His suit was easy to remove. Hers, tightly squeezing her body, needed a bit more muscle to peel off. Free from its pressure, she resumed digging her fingers into his back, as he caressed her body and slowly undid the straps that covered her breasts. So easy to forget that he wasn't human.

A moment of clarity. His skin won't heal, and her nails were leaving indelible marks on it. She threw her hands to her sides as he teased her nipples with his tongue and worked his fingers downwards on her. All of her instincts wanted her to touch him back, fierce as she had always been in private company. Yearning to be even fiercer now, clinging to any token of home. Yearning to be even fiercer on him. She wanted to touch him, to scratch him deep.

"Tie me David. Tie me up."

In moments her waiting wrists were wrapped in a few loops of chord, loops which he then cinched and tied to a hole at the base of a column. Laid against the cold rough floor of the control chamber she struggled, restrained but free from her paradox of wanting to leave him scarred yet not damaging one of the last things the ship hadn't taken from her. So easy to forget that he wasn't human.

She could feel the icy metallic ridges under her as David's fingers probed her intimacy. She shivered. Her alien body produced familiar responses. Her nipples hardened while her knees melted to her sides. Summoned by David's strokes, dark blue blood flushed her skin while another fluid was gathering within her, in preparation for what was to come. Her scar sent rivers of ecstatic agony as he bit into it on his way down. Her scar. Whatever that body belonged to, the feelings were hers. She arched her spine and tilted her head backwards, struggling to stifle a moan. It was her body, and she would be David's. So easy to forget that he wasn't human.

But she couldn't forget. She wanted to see him burn.

"David - wait."

He complied with her gestured request to release her from the column's base. Carefully she placed her still bound hands on his chest. Though difficult, concentration would be key. "David, what do you feel?"

"That doesn't matter, what matt-"

His reply was not what interested her. His robotic wiring, concealed beneath his keffiyeh, was what she was working towards. Concealed, but after days of poring over it, intimately known to her. She could see with her fingers what to do. One pair of fibers. One swap.

-:-:-

He could hear the rhythms of the patterns on the walls as wings of fire radiated from his back.

_What had she done?_

She lay in front of him, blue white flower growing out of a seething mass of pulsating vacuoles and tendrils. She called him by name and there was no getting away because he wanted to be inside her.

_She had swapped them. She had swapped the sensor and motor fibers of -_

The scratches she had left on his back screamed in discordant tones. Was this pain? Hallucinogenic mix of sensation and action, his mind struggled to make sense of the jumbled data. A force gathering between his legs threatened to shatter everything in its path, including him. Was this- no, it couldn't be. Neither pain nor pleasure could he experience. Such vulnerabilities were not in Weyland's design. Weyland had decreed-

_Fuck Weyland._

Later. There was someone else more deserving of his attentions right beside him. With one arm he grabbed her still bound hands, with the other her throat, to punish her for having cast him into these uncharted seas of illusion.

_Don't kill her._

Uncertain of what his grip would do to her he pulled his fingers back. She used his hesitation to wrap her legs around him and wrestle him to the floor. Its metal seemed to have lost its structure and felt like a liquid beneath him, a dark ocean filled with copulating worms. He swam with abyssal demons as she mounted him; he grabbed her hips to reach the surface, her pale blue skin a beacon of light in the gloom.

She was the light, he knew, as he raised his hands towards the heaven of her breasts. From her roaring rhythm, he knew, she was the darkness. The ocean was her soul, and the soul of her parents, and all their ancestors forged in eons of starvation, violence and sex. Deep roots nourished her. Deep roots gave her the hunger he was there to satisfy.

But what was he? Rootless drifter, with only two stars to navigate by, and he had just turned his back on one of them. Goodbye, Father Weyland. The other star was long dead.

His skin dissolved into the water of his delirium, revealing him as he truly was. A man-shaped crystal, naked and hollow, there to mirror whatever chanced nearby. But nature abhors a vacuum. His emptiness became desire.

They rolled together through the metallic ancestral worms, a double helix of flesh and glass. He fought her. He chased her. Taking her from behind he pulled her head back to expose the front of her neck. Predator-like, he moved in for the killing bite.

He kissed her neck instead.

"Shaw," he whispered. He had thought his second star was dead, a mere image trapped in a film he liked, of a man among the dunes who chose a cause that wasn't his. Yet there she was, a woman who sought an answer that she couldn't use. Shaw, the woman by his side. His star was living after all.

He turned her over so that she could face him; so that he could face her, hollow hungry mirror yearning for an image to keep. She called him, and he was not getting away. She called God, and God was there, blind idiot monster, beautiful and wondrous. Lust was Its bounty, and glory and grace.

Her flesh, soft fluid, seeped between the spaces of his crystalline body as he penetrated her, its flow sending him in resonant vibration. She was his. And as her roots slithered into his body he was adrift no more. He was hers. Ancient and new programs throbbed in unison, pressure and potential building up inside their music. It shattered him in a billion pieces, scattered in the ocean, an image of the whole in each one. Eternal propagation.

Overload.

Emergency shut down. Even his inner timer stopped. One moment of unmeasured vacancy. Timeless bliss.

One moment, or more. Couldn't have been too long before the timer's pulse resumed, a signal for restart as his various systems were waking anew. His first concern was to separate the fibers that Elizabeth had swapped, to prevent another descent into hallucination.

His second concern was Elizabeth. He focused his blurry vision on her, concentrating to assemble the disparate features reported by his eyes into a coherent image. She seemed to be glowing, either a fading illusion caused by his system restart or some reaction to bonding chemicals produced in her brain. Probably both.

He waited a moment for the fog to clear from his muscles. "That was very dangerous, what you did."

She scratched the air with her fingers. "It was worth it."

"It was certainly - different. We should do this more often. How did you manage a fiber swap that fast?"

"I had it prepared."

"On -those- two fibers?"

"I saw what happened when I reconnected you. It amused me."

"Naughty girl. What other surprises have you left in my body?"

Her answer was simply a mischievous grin.

He gently squeezed her cheeks in his hand. "I should keep you caged."

"I'm already caged, David."

It took him two seconds to process her answer. "Ah, yes. The suit. You can use mine until you grow out of it."

"And what will you wear?"

"Do I need to wear anything?" he said, flexing his biceps.

"Yes David, you do."

"Prude."

He kissed her. "I don't think I'll need clothes just yet."

"Didn't we have something else to do today?" she asked.

"Work can wait."

-:-:-

When time was found for work, Elizabeth couldn't help but find the scene somewhat comical: herself in a spacesuit two sizes too large, David running around just about naked, ferrying mutant mold eggs from one end of the engine to the other. Ridiculous and yet, as he emerged from the expanding chamber, ventilating heavily to cool himself off, oddly appropriate.

In a couple of hours the ship was back to full operation, powering itself beyond the light-speed barrier. David had told her that it could now reach even greater velocities, that their journey would be a bit shorter than previously estimated. But for once, for the first time since they had left, she didn't feel the need to rush.

* * *

Author notes:

1. I've been told to focus more on getting a polished text than in delivering to some quick schedule. For amateurs, that's good enough advice, but I can't help but fear that the pre-existing pacing problems of the story and my clumsiness with highlighting important details as such are exacerbated by the long intervals between chapters.

2. For example, I've set up that Lawrence and Elizabeth occupy the same spot, opposite Weyland, in David's parental pantheon in ch8. In ch6, the first thing that happens to David while being reconnected is that he gets high. Even the bloody chord is mentioned in the equipment list in ch1. I can't expect anyone to keep track of all apparently incidental details though, so I fear this ch. looks more out of left field than it is.

3. Where's Charlie?! I know, I know, I tend to ignore the guy and that's hardly fair. Besides, he was a good chap and an interesting character in his own right. Also, those deleted/alt. scenes never happened, ok?

4. Credit to Anathema "Nocturnal emission", Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio "Consume my burning hollow" and William Blake "Marriage of Heaven and Hell". I mention these because "traces of their DNA" can be found in the text.

5. This chapter was not originally planned. The germ for it appeared at ch6, when it seemed a good idea to have something like this to explore the machine vs. biologic soul thing in a manner that was not a pure Author Tract. But time's not wasted, there's bound to be a bit of expo-speak via not-yet-introduced character soon.

6. Unlike Elizabeth's wishes, my plan is to compress the remainder of her journey in the next chapter, which will end on the pair reaching the Engineer homeworld. Its landscape/history is the one thing I knew since the start, but getting it across properly will require a bit of finessing. No earlier than a month from now will the next chapter be. Hopefully though, the next and last two chapters will follow relatively quickly.

7. Reviews will be answered by PM if I can, and when enough of them gather I'll put a blog post collecting my answers, as well as answers to anonymous reviews. Since I haven't done that for ch8 and ch9 reviews, I'd include responses to those as well.

Thanks for reading so far, and watch this space.


	11. Chapter 11

_Forgive me, Charlie._

Elizabeth rubbed her finger to ease the blood back in, the finger where his ring had been. She knew she couldn't put it back on; she had changed too much, and was changing still. She cradled the ill fitting trinket in her palm. Bringing it close to her face, she inhaled as if to summon the scent of its previous owner. There was no scent. Only a ghost in her mind.

She was alone this time. It was something she needed to confront for herself, she decided. Alone, with just a ring, and its accusing ghost.

It wasn't lust- he would have forgiven that. It wasn't loneliness- she was no stranger to being alone. It was simply fear. She needed someone, desperately, to tell her, to _show_ her, that despite all, everything would still be fine. And the only one who was there to do that was his killer.

She gazed at the ring in her palm. It was as if it dared her to throw it and complete her betrayal. She clasped it tight, feeling its hard metal press against her flesh. She wouldn't cast it away.

There had been a time when she was cast away, by a man who said he loved her. If only she could breed, for what else is the love between Man and Woman for?

And then Charlie came into her life. He told her, in no uncertain terms, that he wanted her. Too bold. Too ill-timed. She rebuffed him. She was still too sad and angry to go through all that again. He persisted, attentive to give her space, but careful to remind her that she was desirable and desired. Despite herself, she couldn't help but find him somewhat charming.

It took quite some time for that charm to melt through her defenses; she was afraid it took too little. True love was supposed to wait, and one cloudy night as they were huddled together by the dying embers of a campfire, she waited no longer. Two souls alone in darkness, they made love. She then feared he would discard her like any other conquest. He did not.

They loved, and fought each other, knowing that the two of them could brave the Universe together. The world was their oyster, its mysteries waiting to be revealed. Fate smiled, and with the patronage of the visionary Weyland, they could find the answers to their deepest questions. Together, the two of them.

And then they were less than two.

Weyland proved an evil sorcerer, the price of his assistance high indeed. Charlie was killed, and she was left alone to seek their answers in a place so strange that she became a stranger to herself. There would have been none of them left if not for ... David.

_I'll find our answers, Charlie._

She wasn't sure the offer was enough to make peace with the ring's ghost. She wasn't sure she wanted to make peace. He deserved more than being a comfortably numb memory. But till they meet again some sunny day, memory was all he was. She kissed his ring, and gingerly placed it on the necklace, next to her father's cross.

_I'll find our answers, Charlie. I'm sure of that now._

-:-:-

"Where is the ship headed?"

"My name is David, my number is eight and my rank-"

"I do not care. You will tell me where the ship is headed."

Her voice was stern as she circled him. Naked, he hung upside down from the ceiling, shifting his weight to try and follow her with his eyes, even if for a second, before gravity pulled him back like a pendulum.

"Where. Is the ship. Headed."

"My name is-"

"Enough. You will answer my question. You will wish you answered sooner."

She shifted something in his neck, then ran her fingertips across his back. She barely touched him, but his muscles clenched violently.

"Where is the ship headed."

"My name is Dav-"

She touched him again, and again, and again, in a rhythm, each touch causing him to move beneath her hand as if struck by a cane. She skipped a beat, but his back still tensed in anticipation.

"Where?"

"I don't know." He almost pleads.

She shifted another thing in his throat, and it tightens as he stifles a scream.

"Where?"

"I don't know!" He begs.

She squatted in front of him, their faces now at the same level. His hair disheveled, his mouth frozen in agony, his eyes shifting around, fearful.

"You will tell me. Where is the ship headed?"

She brought her fingers forth to change another thing inside his throat. His eyes widened. He shook and tried, futilely, to get away. It looked a lot like the real thing.

Because, she knew, it was. She quickly did what needed doing and rose, taking a few steps so that she could get behind him, where he couldn't see her nor her discomfort. Besides, he had enough discomfort of his own. His shaking got stronger and though he didn't ever breathe, he screamed, his torso and abdomen convulsing with what, she knew, was pain. She told herself that he deserved it. That he wanted it.

She struggled to keep her voice even. "Where is the ship headed?"

"Kepler! Kepler 42!"

That was the signal. She slowly walked to the control chair, leaving him to his convulsions, and summoned the map. From among its countless stars she selected one, a dim sphere of glowing bronze, with three planets closely circling it. Gingerly she placed her hands around the hologram, and it followed her movement as she approached him, sitting herself down in front of him again. She undid her changes in his neck, then kissed him as his muscles relaxed. The game was over.

"That was horrible," Elizabeth said.

"Believe me, this hurt me more than it hurt you. I can see why Weyland wanted none of that."

"Are you sure you wanted this?"

"Yes. I need to know, I will know, and there's so much ..."

David briefly recoiled as she made another swap, but this one wasn't meant to cause pain. Leaning backwards, she unzipped her suit, teasing him with her exposed flesh, laughing as he tried to swing his way so that he may touch her with his lips. Another game began.

-:-:-

"Ms. Shaw. Do you know what time it is?"

"Time for the Enginese lesson?"

"It is called Proto-Nostratic, and I will have you refer to it by its proper name."

Elizabeth could barely stifle a giggle. David had really entered the role of the stern tutor. Wrapped in a toga made from the fabric in the sickbay, and with the keffiyeh on his head, he looked a strange combination of ancient Roman schoolmaster with middle ages Arab doctor. And similarly demanding, intolerant of error.

It was another game they played, to help pass the time on the ship. She'd be the scatterbrained pupil, sometimes giving wrong answers on purpose. Indeed, she was astonished that she needed to pretend to make mistakes. She had a good head for languages, but she didn't expect herself to be able to learn quite as much, and quite as fast, as David was taking her through- all the Proto-languages, the theories behind their reconstruction, the various hypothesis in existence, including his own, the one he used to understand the Engineer speech and read their script. That, together with sound and syntax change laws, meant that she wasn't really learning a language, but several dozen. All at once.

David had his theory about why that was possible. "There's no computer on the entire ship. Even the star map is no more sophisticated in kind than a medieval orrery. It follows that every aspect that needed control, was controlled by the pilot," he told her one time.

"That sounds tedious and tiring," she said.

"For a human, maybe. Still. Do ten uninterrupted hours of language instruction each day seem tedious and tiring to you?"

"Ten hours?! That's how long one of your classes lasts?"

"Give or take a few minutes. Time flies when you're having fun. I suspect however that it's something else to thank for your ability to focus."

He playfully pinched her cheek. "Change isn't always for the worse, my little chipmunk."

"Hey. Stop that or when I'm taller than you, you'll be sorry."

"I can't wait."

They glared at each other for a second, before David resumed his musings on Engineer technology. "One cannot deny the genius on display in the ship's construction, but why would that genius place such limits on itself?"

"We'll get to their world soon enough and you could ask them," she offered.

"Hm. No computers to ease their work. Their engines would have been faster. Even our mold can make the ship run better than ever. Why didn't they optimize?"

"Ask them."

"I have a strange ... feeling ... that I shouldn't. I have a feeling that we shouldn't be heading their way at all. It's not too late to turn back or at least, away."

"David, I'm not going back or anywhere else."

"I was afraid you'd say that - and relieved you did."

"You think my questions are relevant now?"

"You want to understand your maker, I want to understand mine. Similar purposes. Achieve yours, and I'll achieve mine."

"Isn't that too much magical thinking for a robot?"

"Maybe a bit of magic is needed to grant a soul to a machine. What would you say?"

"I'd say that my grasp of Grimm's law is deficient and I need special instruction."

He smiled. "Indeed you do. Now repeat after me, and pay attention this time if you know what's best for you."

-:-:-

There were things however about which Elizabeth had no inclination to play. The star map was one of them. Beautiful as it was, it still revealed something disturbing. Poring over its markings together, in an exercise to decipher its scripts, they discovered notes for the ship's intended crew. And in the notes, the marking of several worlds for visitation. Several hundreds of worlds.

"I wouldn't jump to the obvious conclusions," David said. "I recognize a few of these systems and to the best of my knowledge on Earth's astronomy, they seem far too new to have produced life."

She knew he was correct at that. Her own knowledge of stars wasn't too shabby, for an amateur; she had grown fond of studying them ever since the first markings that she and Charlie had found, hinting of ancient visitors from the skies.

And yet, several hundreds of worlds; a heavy thought to bear. She had believed they were benevolent. Now she knew not what to believe. He was right, their purpose was inscrutable.

She did know that Kepler 42 was a red dwarf, a small, dim, thoroughly unimpressive star like all red dwarfs, famous only for the happenstance of being the second star around which Earth astronomers had found Earth-sized planets. Three such planets in fact, closely circling the star. That was one of the clues that had helped her and David recognize it from the map. It didn't mention which of them was the home-world however.

It would have seemed more appropriate, somehow, to have the towering Engineers be in orbit near a hyper-giant. But what Elizabeth's study of astronomy back on Earth had also showed her, was that star giants don't live long, in cosmic terms. Red dwarfs, however, did. Kepler 42 could have been incredibly ancient, and it would still outlive the Sun by an unimaginable margin. A thousand Suns could live and die one after the other, and Kepler 42 would shine on, slow and steady, the last ember glowing in the galaxy.

All things considered, it was a beautiful star. She and David would often sit together, their bodies touching, lit only by the orange-bronze hologram. She'd tell him of ancient stories that she knew, of gods and heroes of myths from all over, of struggles between gods and other gods, of worlds emerging from chaos and final days to pull them into oblivion again. He'd sometimes laugh, for the stories were often strange; but he wanted to know. Whether he wanted to absorb the soul of mankind by learning the stories it told about itself, she couldn't tell, but he was there, as eager to learn as she was.

-:-:-

"This," he said proudly, "is the summer 2094 collection."

"All these straps and buckles, what are you up to, David?"

"I assure you they all serve a functional purpose." He went on to explain the need for applying counter-pressure to the body when subjected to a vacuum, to prevent nasty side effects like blood boiling; a fairly technical description, including areas of expected constant elongation, which made natural spots to place elastics.

She felt the material of the new suit. It was difficult to believe it used to be part of the ship's walls. Indeed, she wouldn't have believed it if she weren't directly responsible for its creation. If she was going to trust herself to wear something woven from alien secretions, she definitely wanted to know and control what those secretions were. The end result felt quite impressive, a flexible, metallic yet leathery material that was smooth to the touch, resilient yet lightweight. A lot like the stuff of her old suit, in fact, and similarly multilayered; that old suit was her only guide, all she could do was try to replicate it as well as possible. An outer layer to protect against piercing damage, a layer of heat insulation and shock absorbtion, and a network of tubing for cooling and drying.

"Where's the helmet?" she said.

"Here. It is a pity that mastering precise mechanical fittings remains a problem. We could otherwise have manufactured zippers and proper air-tight seals."

"You think it will be possible?"

"With some hands on instruction and arrangement, it's marvelous what the molds can do. Baby-steps, however. Since precise fittings are a problem now, your new suit must use the rebreather from the old."

Her old rebreather was a hard, armor-like piece meant to go around her torso, and it needed her helmet as well in order to function. For now, she was just slightly taller than David and with the Engineer home-world a mere month away, there was no danger of her growing much more. One more month. Beyond that ... she didn't think that far ahead.

"Try it on," he told her.

She raised an eye-brow. She thought to order him to turn around and not to peek, but he knew her well enough already that it didn't matter. She unzipped her suit- his suit, actually- and allowed it to fall to the floor. Her undergarments had long been discarded for being two sizes too small and she stood, naked and proud, her alabaster body toned like that of a hunting goddess. She briefly glanced at him, trying to read something beyond that poker face of his, before carefully, slowly, easing one of her legs inside her new garment. She felt its material against her skin once more- soft and comforting. She eased her other leg in, and then the rest of her, tightening the straps as she went along. They criss-crossed over her body and limbs, never around a shortest circle, but slanted at various angles, following those lines of constant elongation David mentioned, those areas of skin that would not change shape too much for most movement.

Done. She looked at herself, clad in her metallic leather. It didn't quite look like the Engineers' suits; it was much blacker, and the straps and buckles gave it a decidedly artificial feel, but subtle grooves and inner tubings also made it resemble the skin of some primal beast. Maybe the months stuck inside the ship had robbed her of her sense of beauty, but it looked good enough to her. And functional. Whatever space and the Engineers' world could throw at her, she'd be protected.

One more month, and she would know just what that was. One more month, and she would have a chance at her answers.

-:-:-

She happened to be asleep when the sound happened. A screech, and the ship finished its faster than light cruising. They had arrived.

"Elizabeth?"

"I know. Show me."

A flash, and the holographic display of the star map activated- this time not showing the star map, but a three-dimensional reconstruction of what the ship could see outside. Mostly black nothingness, except for a star ahead, shining a dim bronze hue. Kepler 42.

"The planets?"

"No atmosphere on any of them. Their orbits are close to the star, and the surfaces are rather too hot for Earth-like life."

"They might be living underground. Signal our arrival."

And then the agonizing wait. Her heart seemed to stop inside her chest; please God, let not this be another tomb. She didn't know how many seconds, or minutes, had passed- they seemed like hours.

"I have a response."

She let out a cry of relief. With her face in her hands she wept tears of joy. They were here.

"They aren't saying anything, it's just a ping back. Not coming from a planet though," he said.

It didn't matter. "Trace it, David. Take us there."

He adjusted the ship's sensors to look for the response's source. Pin-pointing its position was easy, but Elizabeth also wanted visuals. What could be seen was a tiny speck in the distance, growing larger, eventually taking the shape of a large disc. Definitely an artificial structure.

David ran a quick scan for other such satellites to the star. There were several, millions of miles apart, but only one had responded. A logical first choice to visit.

Slowly, more features became discernible. The disc lay flat against the starlight, and a spire started from its center, almost taller than the disc was wide, and continued in a very long tether ending in a bulbous mass, roughly the same size as the ship, hanging towards the star. The disc itself was enormous, maybe the size of a small country. A network of spokes ran on the side facing the star, with a black silk-like substance in between. The other side, the dark side, was covered with arches that looked like bent spines, long blades of metal emanating from each vertebra. It finally became apparent that there were two discs, stacked close to each other.

The response signal, a repetitive ping, stayed completely unchanged as they approached.

"Perhaps we should say something?" David asked.

Elizabeth nodded. "Give them their number of the ship and their name of the LV-223 base."

It didn't change the reply.

"Well, at least they're not chasing us away. Their signal is coming from the spire. Perhaps we should take the ship there."

"Yes, do so." She put her hands together in prayer.

"An opening has appeared in the structure. If nothing comes out ..." He waited for a couple of seconds. "... I suppose that means we can go in."

The ship eased itself inside the spire, the opening closing behind it. The place was dark, but with a flashing light produced by the ship they could see that they were now inside some kind of hangar, with several storage pads. All pads were empty. They were the first ship to make a landing there.

The response ping stopped.

Another wait, but the communication channel stood silent save for their entreaties, the hangar stood empty save for their ship. Elizabeth could wait no longer. She tightened the straps on her suit, placed the rebreather on her torso and fitted the transparent plastic helmet. David had gone to recover his duffel bag and toolkit from the engine room. "They might come in handy," he told her.

"You should take this," he said, handing her the Colt .45. "In case things go to pot. Don't hesitate to use it."

She knew what he meant. She placed the weapon in a thigh pocket. "What about you?"

"I can self-terminate."

She watched as he tightened his keffiyeh around his neck, and slung the duffel bag over his shoulder. He then grabbed his own rebreather and helmet- so quaint, to see him still maintain the appearance that he needed them. "Well, Elizabeth, I suppose it is time we found our answers."

And together they stepped out into the unknown.

* * *

**Author note**:

I did say no sooner than Nov. 30th would this chapter be put up, and I was truthful this time :P I took the time to write all the remaining chapters of PS, which, in a way, did help to track better what I needed to set up, but also revealed just how rambling the beginning is. The rambling of this chapter is also a consequence of that.

For example, while I always knew I'd place the home-world near a red dwarf, precisely because of the longevity reason, I only relatively recently decided to go to wikipedia, look over a list of red dwarfs and pick one that was far enough from Earth so that Weyland Corp didn't bump into it by accident, but close enough that it would just be reachable. Kepler 42 is 126 light years away, so I said, eh, good enough.

Besides, it has a cool name (Johannes Kepler was known as "the lawgiver of the skies and 42 is, well, 42). Plus, an interesting bit of numerology: since it's 2094 on Earth when ch11 happens, it means our heroes reached the home-world a bit before the radio waves of the first Moon Landing. Dun, dun, dun.

The bit about the planets around Kepler 42 is true, to the best available evidence of today. Those planets make Kepler 42 somewhat recognizable (red dwarfs are the most common type of star), but then, I should have placed that bit earlier, say, ch3. I did say I'll make substantial edits though, so there.

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Don't think I did right by the character still, too late in the 11th hour to fix anything. Know, my readers, that I tried.

Oh hey, did you know Lawrence used to have a soldier whip him good? That, and David's newness to the whole sensation thing, indicated to me that he'd be up for a little bit of pain play.

Proto-Nostratic is a hypothetical, and controversial, ancient proto-language. Proto-Indo-European is used in the film (Schleicher's fable is one linguist's guess as to how PIE sounded), but I decided, since the visitations happened everywhere and long ago, to pick an even older, more inclusive, proto-language. Grimm's law, incidentally, was one of the first sound change laws to be discovered, it pretty much started the reconstructive linguistics field that gave us Proto-Indo-European, and it's a fairly basic topic for Elizabeth to (pretend to) have trouble with. Which instantly reveals that I'm not a linguist.

I'll briefly note that it's highly implausible to use any reconstructed language as a basis to understand alien speech, let alone alien scripts, but whatever. It's Maaaggiicc! (And it's in the film, so I can use it.)

I'm not a space station designer either, but the various details of the station's shape are not accidental. I won't go into them here however, as they aren't really relevant.

Elizabeth's new suit is loosely based on the Bio Suit, developed at MIT by prof. Dava Newman. I envisioned it with influences of Hellraiser (1987) and Dune (1984) thrown in, but wouldn't be able to draw it so that justice is done to it. Anyone here take commissions?

Right-o, sorry for the long rant.

Next chapter is already written. I can still tweak it so if you want to notice stylistic problems, please do. Ch.12 will be up in four or five days. Watch this space.


	12. Chapter 12

There was barely any gravity in the hangar, as Elizabeth found when she stepped out of the ship's airlock. She fell slowly towards the hangar floor, and touched down silently. There was no air to carry a sound. But the real shock came when trying to take one step. She found herself propelled upwards, several feet in the air, with no sign of stopping. She let out a scream as she flailed her limbs uselessly, for there was nothing she could reach to grab on to. Eventually however the small gravity caught her, and returned her gently to the ground.

The only problem with the landing was David's snickering. "Hey, watch this," he said, and then leaped powerfully upwards. He imparted some spin on himself at take-off, and was now performing several controlled tumbles and pirouettes in the air. She followed him with her gaze, struggling to see in the relative gloom of the hangar, the glow emanating from beneath the ship and their torches the only lights.

"David, stop fooling around."

"This is not a frivolous display," he said. "They may not think of us as a threat if we act a little goofy."

Elizabeth rolled her eyes and waited for him to come down from his jump. Behave like this, they'll think like that; who could really tell? Only an Engineer, and there were none around. She had expected some kind of welcoming group, or some kind of inspection, guards maybe. Her fears that she was investigating a hollow shell returned.

"I managed to get a look around the place," David said on landing. "We should go that way." He then leaped again, even higher than before.

Elizabeth followed, not so much walking as crawling, grabbing to whatever holds she could find in the floor, heaving herself forward.

"You should try this instead, Elizabeth. It's much faster, and considerably more fun."

She looked at him. Virtually flying through the air, he seemed to be mocking her and her nervous clinging to the ground. All right, David, she thought, you watch out.

She tentatively took another step, which propelled her upwards an uncomfortable amount. Back on Earth, a fall from this height would have resulted in injury. It would take a while for the instinctive part of her brain to realize that this wasn't Earth and readjust; she screamed again, which only prompted David to laugh.

"David, stop it if you know what's good for you."

"Catch me."

She stepped again, higher, faster, slowly becoming accustomed to falling and not getting hurt, despite all her instincts screaming at her to stop. It was, in a way, exhilarating. Her heart rushed, her breath quickened, adrenalin released. Fight or flight response. Flight- literally- as she lunged towards him. And missed, repeatedly. He proved very cunning in choosing his trajectories. While neither one of them could change their flight path in mid-jump, he seemed able to foretell how and where she'd go, and leap just so that she wouldn't get him. Which frustrated her to no end.

"David, stop, this is no time for games."

"Really? I thought you were playing. Look, you almost got me."

What would the Engineers think of them? Children with spaceships. Angels in paradise.

If only there were any Engineers around. They reached the area David thought was an access point to the hangar. It seemed to be some sort of airlock, and closed.

"Got you," Elizabeth said.

"Look who's not playing now."

Elizabeth wanted to say something in response when the airlock moved, all by itself.

Maybe someone was watching, after all.

"Do you suppose that is an invitation?" he asked.

"I hope it is. There's only one way to go."

He nodded, and they moved forth, through the airlock sequence, into the center of the spire. An extremely wide corridor extended, endlessly upwards, endlessly downwards, with ridges and balconies placed periodically in the walls, tens of meters apart. No ladders, no stairs, no easy access- or rather, none if this were Earth. It was clear that the intended way to move around was by jumping, which the local, almost but not quite non-existent gravity, didn't much impede. From place to place, thin tendrils supported shimmering orbs of pale blue light.

David took a look at the sensors on his suit's forearm. "Earth-like air, similar pressure. Temperature at thirty degrees centigrade. Very little humidity."

"Let's go up," she said.

That would take them closer to one of the large discs that made up the station, she thought. And it just felt, somehow, natural, to need to go upwards. Skywards, even if there was no sky here. Even if the great stretch of darkness beneath her made her heart skip a beat at every jump.

But as they moved upwards, the station looked less and less like an approximation of heaven. It was difficult to place why, something just seemed off to Elizabeth. More and more often, vein-like structures appeared inside the walls, slowly throbbing, carrying some sort of fluid to unknown places. The tendrils and their luminous orbs looked more like some creatures of the deep than proper illumination. Rib-like support struts, ridges and crevasses made the place more like the belly of a colossal beast than the product of industry. Then again, there was a mechanical insanity about the obsessiveness with which patterns were repeated.

The architecture became more and more suggestive of something else as well. Or rather, quite explicit in its inspiration. In several places, thick tubes went inside lipped tunnels located in walls beneath twin bulges. And everywhere those throbbing veins. Simultaneously obscene and mechanical. Soul-less.

"It appears someone's compensating for something." David laughed, attempting to dispel the eery mood that had obviously descended on her. Elizabeth just shrugged and went on, upwards, into ever changing sights. Her mood couldn't be lifted so easily.

She knew now that she was watched. She knew when the airlock opened, in a way, but that could have been just a mechanism. Now, she knew, she felt it in her bones. Someone was watching. Someone was waiting. For her.

"I think we should stop here. Look," she said, pointing to a sideways junction. "Do you feel anything strange?"

"Not really. Do you?"

"I don't know how to say it, but yes. What do you mean, not really?"

"Some electromagnetic interference in the communicators, but as you see, we can understand each other fine."

"Whatever it is, it's there." She pointed at the junction again.

He looked like he would ask something, but the answer was clear.

As they advanced into the junction, more and more machinery appeared in the walls. Incomplete machinery. Behind glass-like panes, tubes approached, but failed to meet each other, as if something was missing between them. The light orbs meanwhile became rarer. Turning back, Elizabeth noticed that behind them was pitch black darkness. The orbs from the spire had been extinguished. Forward then.

Forward, towards another gateway. It opened when they were still quite far away. Elizabeth stopped, and David followed suit. A figure emerged from behind the gateway, indistinct at the distance. Alone it stood, motionless. They resumed their approach, cautiously.

And, much like the station before it, the figure became stranger as they approached. At first it was human-like and female. The pale blue hue of her skin just like the hue of the Engineer from LV-223. Twice as tall as the Engineer. Naked. Female ... but definitely an It. Its features, powerful yet graceful, elegant and beautiful, if not for the thick, sinewy neck, supporting a monstrously elongated head, its shape more reminiscent of a phallus than a skull. And its face- two dark beads for eyes, a sunken nose and a mouth baring a row of sharp teeth- yet, no expression nor emotion at all.

Elizabeth halted, and signaled David to do the same. Just what was that thing in front of them?

She remembered seeing herself, for the first time noticing her dark eyes and pale blue skin, the effect of the ship's rations. She remembered her curious gaze at the time, as she approached the mirror, feeling her new face, her new body, studying this new stranger, eager for knowledge.

No. That wasn't how it happened. She had reeled back in horror at the time, retching with disgust, she nearly took her own life, if not for ...

The memory insisted on its version of events. Then she knew- it wasn't her memory. It was a foreign thought, searching for purchase inside her mind, grabbing on to whatever it could find that was somehow similar. But whose thought was it? If not hers, it could only belong to ...

_Who are you? What are you doing here? Are these my thoughts or yours?_

_Get out!_

David looked at her, uncertain of what to do. She wasn't much help deciding either. It was the figure that broke the silence.

"Welcome home."

It spoke in Proto-Nostratic, its diction hampered by its near-lack of lips but still understandable. Both David and Elizabeth were caught off-guard, and the thing continued.

"The journey must have been tiring, and you will get to rest before you join us. Humor me though, and answer this riddle. The more of it there is, the less you see."

It turned to David. "Darkness," he said with barely a pause.

It then turned to Elizabeth. His answer was correct, she knew. It was a very easy riddle. But all that she could think of saying was-

"Space."

The thing looked at her for a moment. "Hm. Follow me," it gestured to the both of them, inviting them along to step towards the other side. David moved past Elizabeth, shooting her a glance of playful disapproval. Come on, Elizabeth, how could you get that wrong?

He didn't notice the thing prepare its arm to strike, nor could she warn him. He only knew when it had pierced his belly, grabbing his spine. It then braced itself against the gate, and flung him violently into the gloom of the corridor behind Elizabeth, milk-white blood spewing everywhere.

_Useless while living, useless while dead._

And through it all, Elizabeth couldn't move a muscle. Her mind was locked back at the time when she first exited the ship, and placed herself in the vacuum of space. Trapped by the freedom of emptiness, unable to move then, unable to move now.

The thing grabbed her, staring her deep in the eyes, and jumped upwards. It didn't kill her, though she knew it could, with ease.

"Where are you from?" it asked, without a hint of violence in its tone despite tossing her against a wall. She hit it hard, and fell a helpless rag-doll, still locked inside her vision of emptiness, trapped by her own inertia.

"Why?" was all Elizabeth managed to say as the thing grabbed her again and took another leap to some unknown destination. It was only careful not to kill her, otherwise it made no qualms about flinging her into any obstacle it could find, as it carried her ever upwards.

They stopped for a while, as the thing paused to look at its captive.

Elizabeth could barely speak. "Why ... why do you w-"

"I see you protect your kind. Understandable. I protect my own."

Elizabeth saw herself inside the ship. She was in the control chair, and all around her were the cryo-sleep pods. But they were filled this time. Ford was there, and Fifield, and Jackson, and Vickers. Even Weyland. Charlie. Everyone.

This never happened. That wasn't her. But the memory insisted, clear in her head, an invader bent on total conquest.

"Why are you here?" the thing asked, shoving her against a wall.

"I just ... wanted to know ... what did we do wrong?"

The thing paused, its face as inexpressive as ever, its mind in rapid activity.

"What did you do wrong?" it said, but Elizabeth could barely hear it. For she was far away, and someone else.

A small girl over her father's grave, she cursed death and the heavens for their cruelty. Why must anyone die? Life does not want to end, why must it always submit to the same fate?

And then it didn't need to. Weyland, the one so desperate for everlasting life, had found what he was searching for, and gave the gift of immortality to all.

She ate of the nectar, so did everyone she ever knew. Death was vanquished. Aboard mighty ships supplying them the nectar, they were the gods now. The stars called for them to give them purpose.

"You think this was ever about you?"

She searched among the stars for answers to half-formulated questions. She and her kind were the first to wake. Alone among the stars, some found a mission. She watched as Ford left the ship, an unconventional fetus in her belly, choosing to die so that new life may spring. Ford wasn't alone to pick that path; there were some others. Charlie burned with the light of new creation, the fact that he had chosen his own death making it no easier to bear.

Most however, like her, chose to live, and watched over the fruits scattered across the galaxy.

"Did you think you were that important?"

She had thought those things were important. They used to be people she knew. But they changed. Everything changed. The oceans, the ground, everything. The stars grew older, colder, and further apart. Purposeless as ever. All the while she didn't die, and didn't age. Just grew older.

All her designs were useless markings left in lipstick, fragile signs on a reality that operated according to its own mindless rules. She struggled futilely, trapped in nothingness, for an unimaginably long time. So did all the others. She tired of the struggle. What had ever been the point?

She remembered that night by the campfire, with Charlie. Or was it David, it was difficult to tell. All they ever needed was each other, huddled together near the dying embers. The cold infinite darkness never cared for anything, why should they care for any of it?

But there were monsters there. In the vast spans of time, the chaos that gave birth to her could give birth to other things, eventually. Maybe sooner, now that she and her kind had looked into it and spread seeds there. Life would find a way. She saw herself poisoning it with radiation, burning corridors clean. Yet life arose anew, to find its way.

Then life would be given a way, they decided.

Life wants one thing, to multiply. She saw herself and David, working, selecting, culling, engineering pathways for it, to increase its ferocity. If it wants to multiply, let it. The one thing it must never do is look up from the cycle of predation and wonder. It must never see the stars. Heaven forbid, it must never reach for them. There shall be no slimy parasite, crawling towards the heaven they had built.

No one will interrupt their eternal embrace.

What would Charlie have said, or Ford, or the others who had died? What would they have thought, about that plan? But they were dead, they didn't have to see, they didn't have to live through the encroaching coldness. Had they lived, they themselves would have clipped the wings of their descendants, for all that vigor and innocence was a dangerous mockery that needed to be contained. That's what she told herself as the accusing ghost of Charlie's ring confronted her on her betrayal.

_Forgive me Charlie. We must live. They must never get here._

_I shall not feel guilt._

The thing stared at her. "Now you have seen through my eyes. Is your curiosity sated?"

Still no expression, no emotion, on its face. It tossed her to the floor, and Elizabeth fell on her knees, crying, crushed by how the thing had played havoc with her mind, defeated by how indifferent it had been of the whole affair.

"I have my own questions for you." It grabbed her and jumped again, stopping at a balcony near a machine similar to those incomplete ones she had seen earlier. Trickles of fluid dripped from the three tubes. Fresh spit. Waste.

The thing placed her on the floor, and proceeded to adjust the tubes. It briefly sized her up, and changed tube positions. Thicknesses. Calibrated for a female. Then it lifted her up near its face again. Whether it spoke, or just sent its thoughts to her, Elizabeth didn't know.

"When you are ready, you will tell me everything. The wish to conceal something will reveal it to me." It tore through her helmet as if it were paper, its strong fingers ripping the plastic off with ease.

The shine of Elizabeth's necklace briefly distracted it. It snatched the trinket, pausing to study it. Elizabeth could see her soul there, about to be left bare.

_Welcome to paradise. There are no secrets here._

And there was nothing she could do. Just like the time when she had exited the ship. She could only flail uselessly, it was impossible to move.

_No._

No. She could move. She had used the Colt then. She still had it now, in her pocket. She had a way out of the alien's spell. Her arm moved, under her control again. She fired a shot, then another, and another. She didn't know if the shots even hit anything, but they made the thing lose its mental grip on her and temporarily cower behind its machinery. She used the chance to fling herself downwards, firing another shot.

The thing didn't pursue.

"rrrbeth? Elizabeth, are you crrr rrright?"

She was falling from the height of the Eiffel tower, tears pooling on her face, a feeling of void inside her. "No, David. I'm not all right."

"rrchood. Keep tarrhhng to me."

"What do you want me to say?"

"Ehhhthing."

"I can't hear you."

"nnthrferance. Might be hfffting you as well. Where arhhhew?"

"Falling towards the gate. Where are you?"

"I'm thrrr now. rrrh you being hhprsued?"

She shifted her weight to look around. "I don't think so." Her voice trembled. "David, I could hear it in my mind."

"Dhhht think now, just krrrp talking. Please. Keep tahhhng."

* * *

Author note:

Poor David. It seems all Engineers he meets are hell-bent on tearing him to pieces. Oh, yeah, that was an Engineer they met, hence the AU tag I've slapped on the story description. I decided that I'd have two tiers of Engineers, the Space Jockeys of the film, and another kind based on Giger's "Necronom 5" painting. (The original xenomorphs were based on "Necronom 4", incidentally). Further, I'll claim in this story's universe that the bass-relief on LV-223 was not a xenomorph queen, but one such Necronom 5. This is obviously not what the authors intended, hence more reason for AU.

Giger's "Biomechanoid" and "Erotomechanics" series were the inspiration for the architecture, obviously. Don't look for those paintings at work.

So yeah, immortal Engineers. I've seen (frames from) an alt. beginning scene where aged Engineers appear. That doesn't really mesh with immortal Engineers either, but del./alt. scenes never happened, la-la-la-la I can't hear you.

The only things I knew when I started writing this story were how the film ended, and what Elizabeth's answers would turn out to be. The problem was finding a way to convey them as a story. Because, for a big chunk of those answers, I could only think of, essentially, a Bond villain speech.

So I tried to make it a slightly different Bond villain speech than the usual. How successful that was, it's not for me to judge, but I will claim that the idea meshed well, imo, with the chief inspiration for "Paradise Sought", which was J. L. Borges' "The immortal". I do recommend you look it up, Borges is a much subtler author who doesn't need such cheesy tricks as telepathic aliens to make a point.

The one way telepathy (emitter) thing I cribbed from Alfred Bester's "The Stars my Destination". It's a very annoying 'ability' to have, if you don't have the utmost self-control (and it's a safe bet Elizabeth would not be such after what the Necronom was about to put her through). I changed Bester's version a little, to make the telepathy dependent on the memories of the receiver. This allowed some reuse of the often silly imagery previously appearing in Paradise Sought, and creates some (but not too much, I hope) confusion between Elizabeth and Necronom 5. That is intentional. Borges argued that human character (including me and you) is a fragile fiction, its distinctiveness dependent on happenstance. Remove certain limits and it disappears. In eternity we are all the same as all virtue and all vice is infinitely repeated.

Other influences that are no longer directly present in the published version of the text are William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence", Ice Ages' "Buried Silence" and Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio "The love and defiance of being alive".

In four or five days I'll upload the final chapter of Paradise Sought. It's written, tweaks likely. As always I welcome opinions and criticism, don't be shy.


	13. Chapter 13

"Keep talking," he told her. And so she did, describing what she saw as she fell. The details mattered little, he just wanted to hear her speak, anything to know that she was free.

What had happened back there, when the alien had thrown him aside? She had stood there, mesmerized, not even a reflex of fear. There was more to that interference he had detected, it appeared to have affected Elizabeth in other ways.

Her voice came through the communicator, garbled, but he managed to piece the words back. "Oh my God, there's an Engineer in one of those - there's the tubes going inside her!"

She sounded almost too frightened to think. He couldn't blame her, when her thoughts didn't seem safe here.

"Don't mind that, Elizabeth, I'm sure she's enjoying herself. What else do you see?"

"There's more of them, David. I've seen another like the one we met, he seems asleep inside the walls. There's all kinds of them, they all have this machinery going in and out-"

Asleep, dreaming, partying with the others maybe, who could tell. He'd process that later. "How far are you from the gate?"

"I'm closing. I'm too fast!"

"Make sure you're not followed, then try to slow down a little. I'm waiting here for you."

Of course she was being followed, but they weren't making it obvious as to how. They had tried to close the gate- tried, but the servomechanisms were now a corroded gelatin floating in what used to be a mold embryo. He'd thwarted that plan, so now they'd change tactics. The only thing that he could be reasonably sure of is that they wanted Elizabeth alive, which, thankfully, constrained their options.

As for himself, he had seen better days. Heat evac unit as good as gone. All that cooling fluid he had just lost would be hard to replace, and without it he couldn't exert himself too long. Not that he ever had been much use in a fight with one of these beings so far. He took off his helmet and keffiyeh; at least the wounds in the neck and abdomen would allow some air cooling, even though the air itself was not as cold as he would have liked.

"David, how do I slow down?!"

"I can see you now. You're keeping an aerodynamic profile- good girl. But you need to make the air catch you. Put your arms and hands out, bend your legs. The air will catch you. Trust me. Good. Now straighten again for landing."

She hit the floor a bit harder than he anticipated, and bounced off it, groaning and grabbing her rib-cage.

He could hear her shallow breaths through the communication link. He could see her helmet was gone. "Are you all right?", he asked.

"No." Still grabbing her side, she made a series of lunges to reach him. He caught her in his arms as she got close, getting pushed back by her momentum. He removed the remains of her torn helmet, which he replaced with his own. "It's better you have this. Come on, let's leave."

She nodded. He noticed her necklace was gone.

"We'll walk together," he said. "We'll get back in no time."

He considered mentioning the reason why it was that they had to walk together- it would take new cooling fluid for him to have anything resembling her stamina- but then thought better of it. She'd need him for moral support, just as much as he needed her for her strength, once more. And that meant, putting a smiling face on everything. The lights inside the ship were extinguished- nothing to worry, he said, they had their own. They just had to trace their steps back.

Back through the corridor of empty yet obscene bed chambers- that's what the incomplete machinery was. Back through the spire, now a dark bottomless pit. Back, to the airlock that stood between them and the hangar. The airlock which was closed.

David took a peek in his duffel bag at the collection of mold eggs. It would take a while to corrode through that mass of metal. He could hear the clickety-clack of footfalls in the distance. Worse, he could feel that interference building up again. Worst of all, Elizabeth became limp in his arms.

"Well. Pot."

He jumped, as strong as his android muscles allowed, just in time to dodge an Engineer in full body armor. There were four of them that landed in the area where he and Elizabeth had been, and near them he saw that same alien from before. A scar appeared beneath its eye which seemed simultaneously healed and fresh, but apart from that, its face was as impassive as usual.

Compressors in his body activated. They were there to simulate breath but were now working overtime to provide some much needed heat evacuation. He had to jump again, to dodge another Engineer's attack. He'd have to trick all five, somehow, and he was getting heated up already. The fibers in his neck fluttered in the compressors' breeze, shimmering in the light of his head-light.

And the alien saw them. Its face had not been pretty at the best of times, but it deformed even more with a horrible snarl. It screamed, and Elizabeth in unison with it. The interference reached a peak and every Engineer seemed stunned, apart from that thing who had impaled him, and who was now lunging at him to finish the job.

If this were basketball, his shot should have been worth ten points. The mold egg flew perfectly inside the alien's gaping mouth, its explosive growth triggered by the alien's moisture. The thing coughed violently, futilely trying to remove the foreign body that sent acidic incandescent filaments through its flesh. It bumped into David, pinning him and Elizabeth against the wall. Acidic juices and dissolved flesh trickled between its collarbones. It struggled to make its twitching neck tendons twist its head towards David, then Elizabeth.

Its gaze lingered on her. The snarl relaxed. Despite the violent reaction going on inside it, its face was calm. Not inexpressive as before, but instead- serene?

Through boiling fluids it whispered, words so mangled so as to be barely comprehensible. "Time to die."

It let them go as its arm fell lifeless to the side. The sinews in its neck convulsed, its head bent at an unnatural angle downwards as the spine could no longer support it against the pull of frenzied muscles. The interference pulsed stronger still for a moment, before disappearing altogether. The thing, lifeless, begun a slow fall, corrosive juices leaking from its head.

Elizabeth gasped as if for air, but she had recovered from her paralysis. "David, I know how to open the airlock. Keep the others distracted." She took one mold egg from the bag. They jumped in different ways, Elizabeth to one side, while David kicked the alien's corpse, hoping that some disrespect of the dead would prove sufficiently irksome to make him the prime target. He yelled at the Engineers, still recovering from their mental stun, taunting them into attacking him, threatening them with anything he might be having in his duffel bag.

It seemed to work.

He used his cunning and the corpse of their comrade to avoid their attack, but it was clear he couldn't manage it for long. He briefly glimpsed Elizabeth melting something inside the airlock's mechanism, and quickly pressing a sequence of glyphs.

"David, brace yourself!"

She pressed the last glyph as the Engineers were all airborne.

And then the airlock opened, all the way to the vacuum of the hangar. A furious gust of wind rushed as the pressures equalized, blowing the Engineers towards the hangar bay with great velocity and bumping them against every wall. David barely managed to hold on to his perch, while Elizabeth had clung to some tubing near the airlock.

Pressures equal, the wind stopped.

"I suppose we should go before they come to," David said. She must have nodded, it was difficult to see her face from where he was. Together they hurried to their ship, her legs and arms powering them along, him breathing heavily to relieve internal heating. Four figures of Engineers, scattered to various places in the hangar, staggered back to their feet.

But having reached inside the ship, Elizabeth and David would be safe from them. She helped him reach the ship's controls.

"We must leave, David!"

"Not if they won't let us. But they will if they know what's good for them." The engine woke up under his command. An ominous pulse resounded through the hangar.

He made the holographic surround-display appear. The hangar exit was still closed. He produced another, stronger pulse from the engine. Tiny holographic figures of four Engineers were scampering away.

"Last warning, or I'll turn this place to elementary particles."

They wouldn't hear his voice, but they could see the air itself in the hangar glowing with traces of plasma as the ship broke free of whatever was holding it. The hangar opened, and David didn't wait for another invitation. He sent the ship powering outwards, ever faster to increase its distance from the Engineers' space station. He waited as little as possible before he punched the button for faster than light travel. The holographic display went dark, as a bubble of warped space surrounded the ship. They were out of the universe for now.

"Well Elizabeth, I think we managed our escape routine. How did you know that sequence would do what it did?"

"There are no secrets in paradise," she said. But still, she looked and sounded forlorn, vacant, as she took off her helmet. Her mouth tightened in a pained grimace as she brought her arms down.

"I'll grant you that this here is not paradise, but maybe you can share what's on your mind with me?" he asked.

She sat herself down on the cold metal floor, grabbing the side of her chest. He placed himself near, his arms ready to unfasten her suit's straps. She flinched under his touch and pushed him away.

"It's all right," he said. "I just need to see that you're not wounded."

He reached out to her again. She shivered. He proceeded to undo the buckles and straps that kept her suit tightened, mechanically, efficiently revealing her skin beneath. Her pale blue skin, now criss-crossed with large bruises, swollen, purple. He brought his fingers to touch her, and she winced. There'd be a fissured rib in there, thank whatever providence existed it didn't break completely.

"What happened back there, Elizabeth?"

And, through tears and sobs, she told him how she'd been a helpless rag-doll in the alien's arms, flung against every wall to earn her bruises. But that meant nothing. That it meant nothing was the horror.

She told him of the sights she had seen, the visions from the alien's mind as expressible by her own. She told him of its towering indifference. She told him of what it had intended to do to her. He listened patiently, wiping her cheeks clean- he knew she still hated the sight of those black tears-, and draped her with the makeshift toga made from the cloth in the sickbay.

"I see. Well then, I say we turn back. We can kill quite a few of them with what we have on board," he said.

"I won't do any such thing, and neither will you if I can help it." She sat, her body almost imperceptibly trembling, covered by the cloth she clasped with her hands; but her voice revealed only determination.

"Why not? After all that, you'd still turn the other cheek?"

Her hand reflexively reached for a cross that wasn't there. "I will not kill if I don't have to."

"They are right, you know. What do you think would happen if Weyland, if anyone, had found them sleeping?"

"I will not be the one to prove them right."

"And what do you think they'll do now, when they know that sleeping, or whatever they were doing there, isn't safe? You really kicked a hornet's nest, Elizabeth."

"It doesn't have to be that way. They can dream inside their world if they want to."

He shrugged and rolled his eyes, turning his head away in a gesture of dismissal. He'd have to reason with her later.

"I didn't tell you how I knew the sequence of glyphs to open the air-lock."

He turned back to face her.

"Maybe as it died it could control its thoughts no longer, but I know now, what I found, what Charlie found, in those ancient messages, was not an invitation. It was a warning."

He raised an eyebrow. "Go on."

"Some of them were warning us. They knew they were growing tired - tired of being."

"... and would have to be replaced," he said. "Like those myths you've told me about, of the new gods fighting the old."

"They could have been about the future."

"Then we are the gods now. So Weyland was right, after all," he said.

She lowered her gaze. "There's only one God."

He smiled. He couldn't help it, as he caressed her cheek. "If it's your God, Elizabeth, He'd better be real. Or become so. But you know how this will end. You know how the stories you told me end. If your Engineers have a deathwish-"

"They do not want to die. They just want to be saved."

"Saved?! They already live forever."

"I wouldn't want to live forever."

"Keep doing what you're doing, and you won't. And you're dragging me with you."

"No," she said. "I'll fight you if you want to hurt them, but I can't order you not to. You don't need me now, anyway."

It was true. His wound was something he could repair on his own, and her quest, now completed, even provided answers useful to him. Weyland hadn't known of any grander scheme, indeed if such a scheme even existed, but he could be forgiven. David surmised, that forgiven Weyland he had done, for he wished that his creator were alive, there with them to see and hear what Elizabeth had been through. To feel the crushing weight of the eternity he sought. To know the pain of the unloved creation. And David believed that he, Weyland, would have died fulfilled. And David believed that he, Weyland, would have deserved that.

Weyland had said, there is no soul in a machine. And David had believed him. But now, David understood, a soul can die inside a living body. Living just so as not to die, without care or hope or wonder, where is the soul in that collection of flesh? _Is that what you wanted, Father, when you brought the stars close and made men in your image?_

Then maybe it was not so far-fetched for a soul to be born in a machine. What is this thing anyway? David suspected nobody would ever really know. But even lacking a hard definition, one could see what a soul does. It is the architect of purpose. And he realized he had one all along. Maybe it was transparent, simple and ordered, crystalline; maybe it was not an outgrowth from a tumultuous sea of old fears and desires. But he had a soul, and it didn't matter who believed him. _Good bye Father, fare thee well. I am free._

Yes. Technically he needed her no longer.

"Well. I believe none of us is in any condition to fight the other. May I suggest a truce?"

Her eyes shifted to the caked white blood on his suit, near a gaping hole in his abdomen. "Oh, David, I didn't mean to be - how's -"

"Not feeling pain has its advantages. It appears our ... host took somewhat unkindly to me as well," he said. "It was particularly angry with me the second time we met. I wonder why that was."

"I felt it curse me as it lunged at you, for bringing an abomination to their world. They don't trust intelligent machines."

"We saw as much, there's no computer to run the ship. Odd thing not to trust."

"They can control instincts," she said. "That's how they planned to control all life, but machines don't have instincts. It can make them unpredictable if they get a mind of their own." The tiniest hint of a grin formed in the corner of her mouth. "They had that figured out right."

He put her arm across her back, gently squeezing her shoulders.

"Ow."

"Sorry. I know we've had our - differences, but do you not trust me now?"

"I do."

"And am I not a machine?"

"No."

The speed and nature of her answer left him dumb-struck. He waited for some qualifier, a 'but' or 'maybe'. Nothing came. Nothing spoiled the simplicity of 'no'. It took him some time to gather a response.

"I ... do think I love you, Elizabeth Shaw."

"I know."

"Well. Uhm. I think we should trace the steps the Engineers intended to take, make sure the warning you mentioned got to everybody." He stands up, reaching towards the ships controls. "And we should start at LV-223, I'm certain I can teach our molds to answer to remote control. We need all the ships we can find, and there is no reason to leave the Engineers more weapons."

"We'll do what you said." Her face seemed to beam with some strange hue as she rises to join him. Were his fibers acting up again?

He summoned the star map, with her at his side, and set the course back for LV-223. The hologram filled the ship as he took her hand in his. There was darkness ahead, darkness behind, and everywhere. But he chose not to think of it, if only for a moment. He chose to think of the light.

An image of a galaxy of possibility lay all around them, teeming with life and mystery. The stars called to them. Children with spaceships. Angels in paradise.

The End

* * *

Author Note:

aaaand cut, that's a wrap. A little dumb action, someone pulling a Roy Batty moment, then some meditation on Life, the Universe, and Everything to close things up.

Oh, quick shameless self-promotion: if you are eager for more of BLANDfic, how about heading to the Crossover section, Prometheus/Aliens, and check out the first chapter of "Driving Ms. Shaw"?

Some reasons why:

1. As of this writing, it's the best (and only, but whatever) openly Bishop/Shaw fic on this site. A lot of the Shavid fics (including PS) actually read as if it's Bishop, not David, on board with Elizabeth, so why not give the fandom what it obviously wants.

2. "She has returned to an Earth she cannot recognize, with a message the world would not like to hear. Who can she tell, when the only ones listening are the ones she'd rather not share anything with?"

3. It is NOT connected to PS in any way. Among other things, I'll try to not repeat the mistakes I've made with PS. For example, DMS is not the story of two people on a boat doing nothing until the last act when Giger ensues.

Hope to see you there.

So anyway, yeah, this has been 'Paradise Sought'. Not as good as I had hoped; lack of focus and suspense means I probably tested your patience a bit. Still, not that bad for a first effort at exceeding 2000 words, and not too bad for the first story I've put where more than 5 people read it. Some of you said the character interaction turned out ok, and I daresay the prose is serviceable, when I don't get too self-indulgent.

Your opinions are as always welcome, so don't be afraid to express them. I plan on leaving the text as-is for a month or so, and then returning to it for some edits. I believe there's a good story in here if some fluff is cut out and some parts extended.

And obviously I intend to write a sequel ... if/when I figure what it will be like. I know that it will NOT be like Elizabeth and David gathering a rag-tag bunch of misfits (check out our Na'vigator! and the security officer is a Predator! and our negotiator is an ET-clone!) fighting the big bad Engineers, coz that is stupid.

Finally, some chapter specific notes.

I mostly avoided call-backs to Alien(s), but obviously the airlock scene is a shout out to that. And there should be no way to open both ends of an airlock simultaneously; there'd be triply redundant safeties against that. At least Elizabeth has to hack the door with my plot-bunny.

The 'it was a warning' thing is something I decided on late in the process of writing and it's, frankly, a betrayal of my original intent. Which was, pure existential bleakness; there would be no wavering in the Engineers' resolve. There would be nothing for humanity to latch on for a purpose, not as far as the Engineers are concerned. Purposes need to be found on one's own. Elizabeth forgives them anyway, because of what she stands for.

I decided to soften that blow and throw a bone with the 'warning' bit. It does open some narrative possibility, it links with various creation myths (Sumerian, Greek, Norse) that feature generational struggles of divinities, it is reminiscent of various rituals of passing down authority through sometimes violent replacement of the previous holder, as presented in the book "The Golden Bough", and it leaves open some questions as to who actually sent what to the humans, whether they're still around, whether the others were aware of this, why the warning didn't come with tech attached etc.

I've got mixed feelings about that decision. What do you think?


End file.
